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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28276716">Dusty Corridors</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17'>bomberqueen17</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Trust [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Empress Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Eye Trauma, Hand Jobs, Meditation, Mind Control Aftermath &amp; Recovery, Nerd Keira, Other, Politics, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sarcastic Dad Geralt, The Witcher 2 Spoilers, The Witcher 3 Spoilers, Trauma Recovery, biology nerd keira, uhhh warning for the entire content of the three Witcher games basically, weird witcher physiology headcanons, which is getting recapped here</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:14:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>32,744</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28276716</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-rescue, Aiden needs some time to catch up, and Keira has to take care of some things. <strike>Lambert needs to wear a flowered apron and have a hot ass.</strike></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher), Lambert/Keira Metz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Trust [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048918</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>553</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>299</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trans Characters in The Witcher Universe</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Listen I SUPER don't have a ton of brain space at the moment and am having a TON of trouble figuring out what warnings to tag for so PLEASE let me know if I forgot something.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The revelation of what it felt like not to be in any pain from his eye came pretty close to flooring Aiden, but he managed to scrape himself back into an approximately human-shaped object in time to peer out the window as the mage left.</p>
<p>Oh, Lambert was in pretty deep with that mage, though the nature of the control spells had to be quite different from what Aiden himself had endured. The hand-holding and whatnot weren’t… entirely beyond the pale, in terms of what Lambert was capable of, but it didn’t add up to be very Lambert-like, on the whole. And the concept that he would’ve-- Aiden’s mind was so boggled he couldn’t even really break down what would be required to teach a Witcher a new sign. Firstly that someone had taught her how Witcher Signs worked, which was pretty unlikely (although, they’d mentioned Kaer Morhen, and Aiden couldn’t imagine any <em>good</em> reasons for Lambert to have gotten over his hatred of having sorceresses at the keep), and secondly that Lambert, who was made entirely of prickerbushes fencing off areas of himself nobody was allowed to touch, would let her interfere with his Sign-casting ability enough to <em>give him a new one</em>-- </p>
<p>Well, it was all pretty incredible, and Aiden was already on the brink of a complete mental breakdown as it was, so. While he found it horrifying to not know where that mage was, at all times, he also couldn’t help feeling pathetically grateful that she was gone, for a moment, and he could try to collect himself and figure out how to get them free from her. He stumbled back over to the chair next to the table and sat with his face in his hands, just breathing, for a long moment.</p>
<p>Lambert came back through the door and closed it behind him, his expression distant as if he were working through a problem in his head. Aiden wanted to dash over to him and grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he acknowledged their danger, but he stopped himself largely because of his paranoia-- just because he’d watched the mage leave, that didn’t mean she wasn’t still watching them somehow. She might even be in the room. With no medallion, Aiden would have no way to know. And even with one, he wagered, he’d have trouble noticing her if she didn’t want him to.</p>
<p>“Well,” Lambert said, and rubbed his hands together. “That was weird, and I’m a little concerned about that. But there’s not much to be done about it, at the moment.” </p>
<p><em>We have to run</em>, Aiden thought, but couldn’t even force the words out of his mouth. He was exhausted; he hadn’t ridden a horse in, well, years, and doing exercise in his cage or under compulsion wasn’t at all the same thing. He was sore and tired and strangely, it seemed that suddenly not being in pain from his eye was completely undoing him. </p>
<p>Maybe Lambert had cast something else on him, with the cantrip-- or, the mage had been controlling the whole thing. He didn’t have the mental ability to even begin to figure it out, at this point. He let his arms fall limply at his sides, and Lambert looked at him.</p>
<p>“I should start dinner,” he said. “I bet you’re hungry. I sure am, anyway.”</p>
<p>Aiden didn’t answer, having lost the habit of conversation. He realized his error, when Lambert turned back to look at him. “You feel okay?” Lambert asked.</p>
<p>Aiden nodded, because explaining any of this was beyond him, and that mage was still watching, surely. Lambert’s gaze was still on him, though, and he didn’t know how to convey any of what he was thinking. </p>
<p>Lambert came and-- knelt next to him, which wasn’t what Aiden had expected, and took one of his hands between both of his, and gazed up into his face with a frown. “You’re not really okay,” Lambert said.</p>
<p>“I don’t-- I don’t th-think I can catch up,” Aiden said, which wasn’t really what he meant but was close enough. </p>
<p>Lambert stood and-- climbed into his lap, straddling his waist, taking his face between his hands. His arms went around Lambert’s waist by sheer reflex, and the weight of him, the size of him, were both so familiar and completely alien by dint of the length of time since he’d last felt them. </p>
<p>Lambert closed his eyes and tipped his forehead down against Aiden’s, tilting his head a little to one side. His fingers worked in through Aiden’s hair to rest against his scalp. “I didn’t,” Lambert said unsteadily, and then, “you were <em>dead</em>,” and he was crying. </p>
<p>“I was dead,” Aiden echoed, and he couldn’t decide whether to have his hands open or closed, so they kept opening and closing convulsively, never quite settling, taking handfuls of whatever Lambert’s surface texture was where they were, moving around until finally he closed them down around the diagonal lines of Lambert’s familiar sword-harness, and he gripped on firmly, hanging onto that. </p>
<p>“I was a fucking mess, Aiden,” Lambert said. “I didn’t know what to-- I had to-- and oh Gods it’s been just, you’ve missed all kinds of absolutely insane bullshit.” He was about halfway to control of himself, tears flowing pretty freely but he mostly had control of his speech, if jerkily. “I-- Nilfgaard won the fucking war, did you know that?”</p>
<p>“I didn’t,” Aiden said. He kept his face pressed into Lambert’s neck, as it was easiest that way and then he didn’t have to figure out whether he needed to wipe the false eye or not. “I mean I guessed, just now, but, I didn’t even know there was another war.”</p>
<p>“Emhyr’s the Emperor,” Lambert said, freeing one of his hands to wipe his face. “So that’s fucked. He’s a fucker, as much as ever. But he’s. Well it turns out he was hunting for Ciri, right?”</p>
<p>“We’d figured he was after her, yeah,” Aiden said, “but we didn’t know why.”</p>
<p>“She’s his <em>daughter</em>,” Lambert said.</p>
<p>Aiden had to pick his head up to look at him, for that. “What,” he said.</p>
<p>“Oh yeah,” Lambert said. “Turns out Duny was Emhyr the whole fuckin time. He was just biding his time until he could go back and dethrone the Usurper, right?”</p>
<p>“What the <em>fuck</em>,” Aiden said. </p>
<p>“So he’s Ciri’s actual blood father,” Lambert said, “which is a punch in the dick, but get this, in order to pacify the Northlands or-- or something? I’m not clear on the whys here-- he’s promised that he’s going to abdicate in her favor.”</p>
<p>“<em>What</em>,” Aiden said, completely floored. </p>
<p>“And you know, I was like, no way is he really going to do that, only-- well, Ciri was missing, I think, when I, when you--” Lambert’s face went through a funny little convulsion and he actually sobbed, once, then wiped his face and continued, “when you fucking <em>died</em>, Aiden.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Aiden said. “Wait, you found her?”</p>
<p>“Oh,” Lambert said, “we-- ha. Well, the Wild Hunt found her, and Geralt had to chase her down to find her before they did, and it was a whole fuckin’ thing, and eventually he caught up to her and we kind of knew and kind of couldn’t do anything else, so the two of them came and let themselves get cornered at Kaer Morhen, where we were waiting with-- well, just about anybody who was still talking to us, really.”</p>
<p>“Kaer Morhen,” Aiden murmured, connecting some dots in his mind.</p>
<p>“Geralt yanked Keira out of some backwater where she was hiding in exile-- oh, was Radovid burning mages when you-- fucking <em>died</em>--?”</p>
<p>“Burning mages,” Aiden said. “What? No. What?!”</p>
<p>Lambert laughed hollowly. “He’s either burned at the stake, impaled, tortured, or otherwise had executed most of the Mages of the Northlands by now,” he said. “I guess it was because they pinned Foltest’s assassination on the Lodge, or something, I’m really not even sure how it started-- maybe with Demavend of Aedirn, that was a shitshow-- but it got out of hand and they had just all these pogroms of nonhumans, and it’s been a shitshow all around. I mean the Eternal Fire was in it, there was a whole-- it was just a bad scene.”</p>
<p>Aiden considered it a moment. “Sorry I missed that,” he said, grimacing. Foltest’s <em>assassination</em>? He’d missed a <em>lot</em>. </p>
<p>Lambert laughed again. “Yeah,” he said, “it hasn’t been great. Geralt was, like, balls-deep in all of it, of course, and-- I mean, I can’t even begin to figure it out myself, let alone explain it to you. Anyway, so, it came down to Kaer Morhen and a kind of stupid last stand because Geralt can’t do anything without maximum drama, so we had us plus the usuals, a bunch of Geralt’s friends, Triss and Yennefer, you know how I love <em>them</em>, and some others, and-- well, we mostly won, they didn’t get Ciri.”</p>
<p>Aiden shivered. “Someone said--” He couldn’t remember. He focused, trying to recall the exact phrase. “The last survivor from Kaer Morhen came down and told them the keep was abandoned.”</p>
<p>“More than one survivor,” Lambert said, and wiped his face. “Only-- they only k-killed Ves-Vesemir,” and he had to stop, knuckles pressed to his mouth.</p>
<p>“Ah, fuck,” Aiden said. He had only met Vesemir in passing, quite young, and maybe another time on the Path but he didn’t know the man, but Lambert spoke of him all the time and obviously had mixed but intense feelings about him. Loving and resenting someone really didn’t add up at all to wanting them dead. He tightened his hold on Lambert and pulled him in closer. “Sorry to hear it.”</p>
<p>“At least,” Lambert said unevenly, “the old f-fuck died f-fighting.” And then he sobbed, got himself under control a little, and sat silently, holding himself still and quiet for a moment, only trembling a little.</p>
<p>“Lambert,” Aiden said, and slid his fingers around the back of the other’s neck. They sat motionless a moment, and then Lambert took in a big breath, rubbed his face, and sat up a little. </p>
<p>“Almost killed me too,” Lambert said. “Keira saved me, so I felt like I ought to be nice to her after that.” He wiped his eyes. “Kaer Morhen’s even more of a shit-heap now, all ruined really, so after everything was over we cleared out of there. Keira didn’t have anywhere to go so I gave up that one safehouse I’d been working on up in Kaedwen, the one with the wraiths. Did I ever take you there? I don’t think I did.”</p>
<p>“No,” Aiden said, “not Kaedwen.” It was strange, to probe these disused and dusty passages of his mind, to find all these places he used to spend so much time, all these things he remembered so vividly but at a remove now. “Ah, but the old farmhouse, with the wraiths, yeah. You had a whole bunch of stuff stockpiled there.”</p>
<p>“I did,” Lambert said. “And then since she can, you know, fucking <em>translocate</em>, she helped me haul a bunch more shit out of Kaer Morhen so I didn’t have to burn it.”</p>
<p>It was possible that the mage had captured Lambert as soon as that. Lambert never gave up a stockpile or cache site. </p>
<p>Or… well, he <em>had</em>, to Aiden. He hadn’t told Aiden about all of them, but he’d shown him some, and given him directions to others. Would he do the same for this mage, on such short acquaintance?</p>
<p>“I left her there,” Lambert said, “introduced her in the village and said she was a hedgewitch, which was how she’d been hiding out in exile. They were glad to have her because they didn’t have so much as an herbalist, and for whatever else Keira is, she’s a decent herbalist. She’s actually mostly specialized in medicine, I think she’d be happiest working as a healer, but. I mean, she can also throw lightning from her hands and levitate people and things, so she’s. She’s a useful friend to have, Aiden.”</p>
<p>“Mages can make themselves quite useful,” Aiden said noncommittally. </p>
<p>“I mean,” Lambert said. “They can also be assholes. But think of this, that’s probably why nobody noticed Halmatia was keeping you as a fucking pet-- because the war started not a whole lot after you, uh, after you died--”</p>
<p>“I want you to just say <em>you fucking died</em> every time it comes up,” Aiden said, “it sounds better that way.”</p>
<p>“You fucking <em>died</em>, Aiden,” Lambert said. </p>
<p>“I fucking died,” Aiden said. </p>
<p>Lambert was crying again. “You <em>fucking</em> died,” he said, and wiped his face angrily. “I got Geralt to help me and I hunted down everyone who’d ever fucking <em>spoken to</em> Karadin. He was living it up in Novigrad, married a widow with some kids-- tried to feed me a line of bullshit that he’d <em>changed</em>, he was <em>different</em> now.”</p>
<p>Aiden sniffed skeptically. “He always used to say if he got enough money he could buy his way to being respectable, Witcher or no,” he said. </p>
<p>“That’s exactly what he did,” Lambert said. “Probably-- fuck, because he got the bounty on you and then he sold your not-quite-dead carcass, that’s it, isn’t it.”</p>
<p>Aiden considered it. “Likely,” he said. “I mean, I don’t remember.”</p>
<p>“Set up shop as a merchant,” Lambert said. “Called himself Treugger.”</p>
<p>Aiden’s head jerked up sharply, at that. “We knew a Treugger,” he said. He didn’t remember the details, but some merchant he and a good few of the Cats had dealt with had been named… Treugger or Tauler or something. Maybe it wasn’t the same guy.</p>
<p>“Well,” Lambert said. “Maybe Karadin killed him to take his spot. Threw around a lot of money to charities and things. You know what business he specialized in?”</p>
<p>“I can guess,” Aiden said sourly. “Drugs, or slaves.”</p>
<p>“Slaves,” Lambert said. He tilted his head. “If there were drugs too I didn’t catch it. The slaves were enough for me.”</p>
<p>“Fuck,” Aiden said. He sighed, and let his forehead come to rest against Lambert’s shoulder. </p>
<p>“Well, he’s dead now,” Lambert said with some satisfaction. “Like for real dead, I did it myself. And you can thank Geralt for that, but only because I managed to get him to help me before all the bullshit with Ciri came to a screaming conclusion.”</p>
<p>Aiden laughed, not moving his head from its safe harbor. “Geralt does always seem to have some bizarrely epic problems.”</p>
<p>“Like you would <em>not believe</em>,” Lambert said. “I think like, you know how if sharks stop swimming they drown? I think if Geralt doesn’t get a pretty regular dose of drama, preferably dick-first, he’ll just dry up and fall apart.”</p>
<p>Aiden laughed hard enough at that for it to hurt behind his eye socket, just a little, reassuringly, and he pressed his face harder against Lambert’s shoulder and breathed through it. </p>
<p>“So anyway,” Lambert went on, “now his daughter’s next in line to be the Empress. She’s Crown Princess and living in Nilfgaard. Geralt said he wasn’t going to visit her but I figure he’s down there right now, he <em>absolutely</em> can’t resist that kind of shit.”</p>
<p>Aiden laughed. Maybe it didn’t matter that Lambert was a sorceress’s love-slave, or whatever he was to her. If she didn’t care to control him all the time, maybe that was okay. Gods, he was so afraid, and so tired of being afraid, and so-- just so tired. </p>
<p>“Anyway,” Lambert said, again, sort of aimlessly, and he was resting his cheek against the top of Aiden’s head. He smelled so good, smelled right, smelled of potions and laundry soap and woodsmoke and just a hint of tasteful perfume, the mage probably had expensive soap and she kept him nicely bathed and well turned-out and he was a much more pampered pet than Aiden had been. Maybe it was nice enough that he stayed of his own free will. </p>
<p>Lambert sighed. “So at the end of autumn I went to see if she’d let me stay in that safehouse too, since she’d told me I could come back if I wanted, and she was glad enough of the company, so I’ve been up there with her ever since. A couple of months now. No roof repairs. I do the cooking, she does the dishes, and she cheats with magic but I don’t care as long as they’re clean. She’s got a tidy enough business selling witch stuff to the villagers. Nicest winter I’ve spent in a while.”</p>
<p><em>Let it go</em>, Aiden thought. <em>Just, nod along</em>. But his mouth was done being obedient, and he said, muffled and quiet against Lambert’s shoulder, “She make you do anything for her yet?”</p>
<p>“Not really,” Lambert said. He was quiet. “She didn’t pry, about you. I was a mess and admitted there’d been… somebody. I was pretty fucked-up. I made a joke about a shoe fetish and almost started crying.”</p>
<p>“You and your feet thing,” Aiden murmured, unable not to grin against the leather of Lambert’s gambeson.</p>
<p>“Okay she had <em>invisible magic shoes</em> on,” he said, his normal level of animation coming back all at once. “I was so offended I didn’t even know where to <em>look</em>.”</p>
<p>Aiden raised his head and looked at Lambert. “Did you get angry at how shameless her toes were?” he asked, amused. </p>
<p>“Who wears <em>invisible shoes</em>,” Lambert said. “In the fucking sleet! In the mud! It was maddening! You bet your ass I was mad about it!”</p>
<p>“What a hussy,” Aiden said. “And you with your whole feet thing.”</p>
<p>“She promised me,” Lambert said, “not to tempt me with her harlot toes.”</p>
<p>“So it’s not really an inside joke with me,” Aiden pointed out, “it really is that you genuinely have a foot fetish and everyone around you knows it.”</p>
<p>“I still have those shoes,” Lambert said, his tone changing abruptly. Aiden blinked up at him. “All the shit we hauled out of Kaer Morhen-- I saved all my. You know. My frilly stuff. A whole trunk full. And I have those shoes in that trunk.”</p>
<p>Aiden frowned at him for a moment, and then suddenly the memory of those heeled mules jolted back into his mind, and he sucked in a breath and said, “Fuck, <em>those</em> shoes.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Lambert said, “<em>those</em> shoes.”</p>
<p>Now, that was a very dusty pathway of his brain indeed, but he stumbled down it a little ways and discovered with some shock that he still could, in fact, remember what it felt like to have sexual feelings, and he didn’t go through the door of it, so to speak, but he kind of leaned in the doorway and thought about it a moment, aided considerably by the familiar heft of Lambert sitting in his lap and curling his fingers around the back of Aiden’s neck, sort of cupping his face, with that particular expression on his face like maybe he was going to make fun of Aiden and maybe he was going to kiss him. </p>
<p>“Fuck,” Aiden said, closing his eyes, “you know, in the worst of it, when I couldn’t really remember who I was, I remembered those shoes, and I couldn’t exactly remember what was so great about them but I remembered that they were great.”</p>
<p>Lambert shifted, and pressed something against his forehead-- his mouth, Lambert was kissing his forehead. Aiden just breathed, and Lambert pulled his mouth away and pressed his forehead there instead, and said, “You <em>fucking died</em>.”</p>
<p>“Mm,” Aiden said. He <em>hadn’t</em> died, which was sort of the problem, and sort of the-- well, it was good, really, that he was alive, because now he could have this, but the last-- “I can’t believe it was three fucking years,” he said. The last three years, <em>three years</em>, had been so awful. But he had this, now. Whatever this was. This was Lambert, which was a hell of a lot better than not-Lambert, so whatever else it was, it was already superior to the not-Lambert he’d been living through. </p>
<p>He wrapped his arms tighter around Lambert’s midsection, and squeezed until the Wolf made a faint squeak of protest. “Hey now,” he said, “my weather ribs.”</p>
<p>Aiden laughed. “Lambert’s weather ribs,” he said, and didn’t let go. Like this, he could feel every breath Lambert took, could feel his heartbeat, could feel the blood moving through his various arteries-- if he focused, he could make out the pulse in Lambert’s femoral artery on the one side where it was tucked against his hip, though he couldn’t make out the other one, the way they were sitting. </p>
<p>Lambert was at his winter weight, nice and fattened-up-- it wasn’t a tremendous difference, but Aiden could tell from his circumference and the position of the buckles on his various gear that he’d been eating well, and was sleek and well-muscled rather than the lean ropy rawboned edge he’d have by the end of autumn after the depredations of a summer on the Path. </p>
<p>If he was a pet, he was a treasured one.</p>
<p>Aiden was suddenly frantic to feel Lambert’s skin, so he let go-- Lambert exhaled sharply in surprise at the sudden lack of resistance-- and set to the familiar buckles with a will. It only took Lambert a moment to catch on, and then he was helping, and his slightly-battered gear hit the floor in pieces one after another and he leaned down to kiss Aiden with a shocking hunger and oh-- Aiden’s body sprinted merrily down the dusty pathway of arousal and slammed straight through the doorway and Aiden stood up with Lambert in his arms and set him down on the table and went to work with redoubled interest on the lacings of his trousers.</p>
<p>“Fuck,” Lambert said, “fuck, you too, you need to get out of this stupid outfit--”</p>
<p>Aiden hauled his jerkin or whatever off over his head and stood there, suddenly chilled by that whiff of scent of Halmatia’s house. Keira was certainly watching them, by some magical means or other. Would she be watching the bedroom more, or less? Would it matter? Did he care?</p>
<p>He threw the jerkin, with the shirt bundled-up in it, onto the floor, and looked down at Lambert, who was breathing hard and wearing only a shirt, and his trousers open but still most of the way up, and he had lacy underpants on and the outline of his dick was pretty clear, there. </p>
<p>“You think we should take this to a bedroom?” Aiden said. </p>
<p>“I think you talk too fucking much,” Lambert said.</p>
<p>“Which bedroom is yours?” Aiden asked, looking dubiously at the open doorways. </p>
<p>“I’ve never been here before,” Lambert said. “But I thought the one on the left looked pretty good.”</p>
<p>“Fine,” Aiden said, rather than addressing that, and he picked Lambert up by the ass and hauled him through the leftward door, and threw him down on the bed in there. Maybe the mage would watch them in here too but he’d run out of capacity to care.</p>
<p>He stood there, unfastening his own trousers, and Lambert wriggled out of his and then pulled his shirt off over his head. Aiden’s breath left his body with a little whimpering moan and he dropped down to his knees and crawled onto the bed, pressing himself against Lambert’s torso, and Lambert kissed him then, hot and hungry against his mouth, and it was so much skin, the heat of his body, the familiar grasp of his hand; it lit up all kinds of corridors of Aiden’s brain that had been dark and cold and silent for so long, and Aiden had not the slightest prayer of being coordinated or composed about any of it. He fell all to pieces right then and there, no hope of dignity or self-possession and he did not even take an instant to consider the mage watching them. </p>
<p>He wasn’t even sure whether he got off or not, he was so lost in it, but after a bit he came back to himself and he was crying and curled up against Lambert and he smelled like-- well they smelled like each other and that was great, and he wasn’t sure whose spend was all over his chest but then he could make out the distinctive tang of potion-detox and knew it was Lambert’s (Tawny Owl and the weird Wolf version of Thunderbolt that’d turn your ass inside-out if you weren’t sparing with it), so that was good, and Lambert had his arms around him and was murmuring soft repetitive comforting nothings to him. </p>
<p>“Fuck,” Aiden said, and wiped his eyes on his hand, a bit dazed. It was almost like having gone berserk with the adrenaline-rage but obviously much less bloody, but he felt similarly wrung-out. </p>
<p>“Hush,” Lambert said fondly, and kissed his face. “Hang on, I’m going to go get a rag, we made a mess.”</p>
<p>“<em>We</em>,” Aiden said, the sarcasm coming back by reflex. Oh, that corridor had been dark a while too, and it felt weird to use it.</p>
<p>Lambert gave him a look as he stood up, and oh, sure, Lambert’s torso had a good thick smear of spend down it that had to be Aiden’s. “Uh, <em>we</em>,” Lambert said firmly.</p>
<p>“I fucking <em>died</em>,” Aiden protested. </p>
<p>“Ooh, that’s going to be your excuse for <em>years</em>,” Lambert said, and he was still wearing his underpants, though not all the way. He adjusted them as he walked out of the room so that he was more or less contained in them again, and Aiden watched him fondly as he left. Yeah, that was his winter weight-- he always had a pretty decent ass, but there was never enough of it to jiggle when smacked any other time of year. He came back in just a moment, and got back into the bed and kissed Aiden as he wiped him off. “I mean, it’ll work for years too, I’m just letting you know it’s not funny. It’s too soon, man.”</p>
<p>Aiden wriggled himself under the blankets-- decent-quality, recently-laundered blankets, no less. This was the nicest abandoned farmhouse he’d ever holed up in. Or-- he didn’t know the story, actually. Nicer than Lambert’s bolt-holes tended to be.</p>
<p>Oh, right, the mage. He’d almost forgotten about her, for a split-second. </p>
<p>Lambert crawled under the blankets too. “It’s too early to go to sleep,” he said. </p>
<p>“Like I have any concept of hours of the day anymore,” Aiden scoffed, enfolding Lambert in his arms. </p>
<p>“I guess I live here now,” Lambert grumbled.</p>
<p>“You sure do, buddy,” Aiden said, and passed out.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Geralt can't keep his nose out of this, that's not how he works.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Additional warnings: semi-indirect mention of past self-harm (wrist scars) and there was something else I thought might be squicky in Keira's POV section and I don't remember what, so I'm very sorry (sort of... suicide-by-cop ideation, indirectly? I'm not sure how to tag it); be prepared for violent imagery and a lot of emotional distress, but (spoiler alert) nothing terrible actually happens in the chapter.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Keira let herself pace, after a while, in another Nilfgaardian antechamber (this one much fancier), wrapped in a full suite of cosmetic illusions and feeling her body twitch occasionally with exhaustion. She’d gone back to the farmhouse, and she’d tried to settle herself, but food had tasted of ashes and the house seemed echoingly empty and it taunted her with unaccustomed loneliness. She had sent the messages she needed to send, had written the notes she needed to, had compiled the necessary report and set her affairs as in order as she could manage. And then she’d tried to sleep, to no avail. In desperation she’d finally let herself go lie in Lambert’s bed surrounded by his things, and she’d cried herself to sleep, which was stupid. She’d <em>won</em>, it was <em>good</em>, and now he’d be happy, and she didn’t know why her chest hurt so much.</p><p>She’d dozed off for just long enough to wake herself up with a screaming nightmare-- the usual, impalement, and it had the by now accustomed taste of a true dream, which was just what she did not need. Prophesying her own death was not only terrifying but tedious. She would die by impalement and it did her no good to know that. Especially not because it was possible she’d do so as a result of this upcoming audience.</p><p>So, she was not in her best state this morning, and the audience was likely to be a discerning one, but there was no help for it.</p><p>She made herself sit still and found herself staring at her hands, thinking of the way Lambert had rubbed his thumb across the blisters of her left hand, thinking of the way he’d pulled from the bracelet she’d given him to cast a healing cantrip on her, thinking of-- nothing-- and her hands were shaking and her eyes were gritty and she needed to sleep and she just needed to-- not exist for a little bit, a day or two, maybe she could just sleeping-charm herself to better mental health, wouldn’t that be nice.</p><p>The door clicked open and she yanked her blank-eyed gaze away from her own wretched hands to look up, but it wasn’t Cirilla. She’d hoped, but no, it was a man, it was--</p><p>It was--</p><p><em>Geralt</em>, it was Geralt, what the fuck was he doing here?</p><p>“What the fuck are you d--,” her mouth got out before she bit it ruthlessly down and said, pleasantly, “Geralt!”</p><p>Geralt looked unusually sleek and well-groomed and satisfied with himself. She had no idea what the fuck he could possibly be doing in Nilfgaard, and had not prepared herself one whit for this eventuality, and her nonsensical immediate reaction was that her body tried to burst into tears, and she had to wrestle that down with the last shreds of her self-control, so he had time to give her a studied once-over and look even more satisfied with himself.</p><p>“Keira,” he said, clasping her hand politely and then taking a seat next to her. “You look well.”</p><p>“It’s illusions,” she said, because she expected he would suss that out rather directly himself. She knew if she cried he’d assume she was trying to manipulate him again, so it was important not to show too much weakness. “But you <em>genuinely</em> look well, which astonishes me because I thought that coat of grime you usually have was protective.”</p><p>“Hm,” he said, but looked amused, or maybe that was just his smugness. Part of her was convinced he was smug because he had heard of her ongoing heartbreak and was here to revel in it, and she had to expend yet another bit of self-control to wrestle that down too, given that it was utter nonsense. It was exhausting to be this exhausted. “What brings you to Nilfgaard?”</p><p>She sighed. “I murdered someone,” she said, “and it was someone who needed killing, but I didn’t have permission, so I thought I had better come report it in person straightaway, and I didn’t really think there was anyone who properly had jurisdiction in this matter at any lower level of the government.”</p><p>Geralt’s eyebrows went up. “In hindsight,” he said, after a pause, “I possibly should have expected this.”</p><p>“Should you?” she said acidly. “There’s no governing body of mages presently, Geralt, anyone who had any decency’s been fucking burnt at the stake or impaled or something, I’ve been afraid to so much as sneeze lest I join them,” and she couldn’t help shivering. “But I found a rogue mage, a dangerous one, and I didn’t have anyone I could ask for help, so I killed her myself, and I’m here to face justice about it.”</p><p>Geralt blinked at her, frowning, and said, “Well, now, that’s interesting.”</p><p>“Are you in charge of that?” she asked. “Why have they sent you in to ask me? Is that what you do for Nilfgaard?”</p><p>“No,” Geralt said, “I’m just visiting. I came to ask you how my brother is, and catch up, if I could.”</p><p>She deflated slightly. “Oh,” she said. “Well.” She slouched a little in her seat. “Lambert’s fine, he’s been doing very well.” And then it struck her that she ought to make amends. She sniffed, gathering herself. “I owe you an apology, Geralt, for how I treated you when-- back in Velen.” Her face burned and she was staring at her hands again.</p><p>“Consider it forgotten,” Geralt said. “Except--”</p><p>He paused long enough that she blinked and looked up at him. “What?”</p><p>“You described our encounter to Yen as <em>very pleasant</em>,” he said. “I was <em>perfectly considerate</em> and it was <em>very pleasant</em>?”</p><p>“Ought I to have <em>tried</em> to make her jealous?” Keira asked, mildly incredulous, and his eyebrows moved somewhat as he considered that. “You’re welcome.”</p><p>Geralt sighed, in smug pretense of weariness-- the smugness was really unbecoming on him, she thought in irritation, but she knew it was partly that she herself was presently so miserable. Maybe the worst fucking thing about Geralt was that he was so fucking <em>likable</em>. “I suppose,” he said. “Well, I hope whatever you’re doing with Lambert is better than <em>very pleasant</em>, for your sake.”</p><p>It felt kind of like he’d stabbed her very deeply with something very sharp right between a couple of her ribs, and she found that her face’s instinctive reflex was to paste on a grin that showed most of her teeth. “It’s been magical,” she said.</p><p>Geralt looked briefly concerned, but then his expression went unreadable. “Magical,” he said.</p><p>She shrugged, and let herself slump over. “I just killed someone for him,” she said bleakly, “more or less, and I don’t know whether this new government is going to punish me for it or what, but I could not have done other than what I did.”</p><p>“Hang on,” Geralt said, “back up, you’re taking the blame for it?”</p><p>“I did the killing,” Keira said. “Oh, you probably know enough to understand the context. You know about Aiden, right?”</p><p>His eyebrows drew together, smugness shifting to grimness. “The count who put out the contract on him is dead,” he said. “I already checked.”</p><p>“Ah,” Keira said. “No, I knew that; didn’t Cirilla mention it? She had to get involved when I located Aiden’s medallion and then Lambert said he’d be fine on his own retrieving it, and wasn’t.”</p><p>“Oh, yes, she did,” Geralt said.</p><p>“Well, I went on from there, and tried to locate Aiden’s body, but I kept getting strange results in my location spells,” Keira said. “Come to find out, Aiden’s body can’t be located because he’s not dead.”</p><p>Geralt’s face went completely blank in clear shock. “What,” he said.</p><p>“Not at all!” Keira said. “Not in the slightest bit dead.”</p><p>“Then where the fuck was he?” Geralt demanded.</p><p>Keira smiled bitterly. “A mage had him,” she said, “completely entrapped in control spells. I found him in a marketplace being puppeted around doing errands, and only recognized him when he noticed I was a mage and could read minds and started silently begging me to kill him.”</p><p>Geralt stared at her, dumbfounded, and then quietly said, “Fuck.”</p><p>“I had to convince the mage to remove the control spells,” she said. “They were wound all through him, and if I’d removed them, they’d have killed him or at least destroyed his consciousness on the way out.”</p><p>“I can see why you didn’t go for help on that one,” Geralt said wryly.</p><p>“I pretended to befriend the mage,” Keira said. “I had to pretend to like her, and pretend to have an interest in Witchers especially, and pretend Lambert was my pet-- but fortunately, I’d learned my lesson, and did not believe him when he said he’d come along and pretend to be under control. So I only referred to him, I didn’t actually let her see him.”</p><p>Geralt grimaced. “Sensible,” he said. “I-- Lambert is very efficient but he’s not…”</p><p>“He’s better at lying than you,” Keira said, “but not by much.” She shook her head, and shivered. “Anyway I wasn’t letting that monster get so much as a <em>look</em> at him.”</p><p>“So what happened?” Geralt asked.</p><p>“They’re-- it worked,” Keira said. “I got the mage to pull the control spells off of Aiden to show him off, and then I-- I killed her,” it wasn’t like Geralt was going to turn Aiden in but it was important that she not change her story at any point. The simplest explanation was that she’d killed Halmatia, so that was the story. “And Aiden’s freed and seems to be all right. He’d lost an eye, and she’d put in a horrible replacement-- did you ever see Vilgefortz when he had his-- of course you did.”</p><p>“Oh, I saw plenty of Vilgefortz,” Geralt said, and grimaced. “I don’t know how one of those gemstone things would work, with a Witcher’s metabolism and healing ability.”</p><p>“So he’ll need help with that,” Keira said. “I told Triss this but I’ll tell you, too-- if I can’t, depending what they decide here, someone’s got to ask Philippa for help.”</p><p>Geralt made a thoughtfully dismayed hissing noise between his teeth, and Keira waved her hand wearily. “I know,” she said. “I’d rather not either, but she’s the one who knows properly about eyes. I don’t like to think what she’ll want in return, but there’s no help for it.”</p><p>Geralt sighed. “Doesn’t sound like there’s much choice,” he agreed. Then he frowned. “Depending what they decide here?”</p><p>“I’ve come to turn myself in for murder,” Keira reminded him. “I’m certainly hoping that having done Cirilla favors in the past, and having indeed committed the offense largely to benefit a member of her family, will earn me some consideration, but one cannot count one’s chickens before the eggs have even hatched, now <em>can</em> one?” She managed a smile, though it felt brittle. “I don’t want there not to be consequences for murder, I don’t want it to be easy for mages to trump up charges against one another. So I’ve brought all the proof I can of what she was doing and why I felt I had to do what I did, but I don’t-- I don’t know if it’s enough and I don’t know if it <em>should be</em> enough.”</p><p>“Hm,” Geralt said. He stood up. “Well, I can go ask Ciri.”</p><p>“I have a whole report prepared,” Keira said, mildly offended. She gestured with the crystal in her hand, upon which she’d compiled her evidence. Had they sent him out to speak to her <em>instead</em> of anyone official? Well, she couldn’t get too angry; it wasn’t her government. It didn’t feel good to be so unimportant as to not rate an audience, directly, but it was better that than getting executed.</p><p>Fuck, she was so afraid of getting executed. She wished she could stop caring about it but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you could just be easygoing about.</p><p>Geralt was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read. “You know,” he said, “I expected you to try to win me over with tears, or something. I can smell how hard you’re working not to cry, and it’s really odd.”</p><p>Of course that set her off, and she burst into furious tears. “Fuck you,” she howled, and threw the crystal she’d been holding at him. He caught it, and she bit back her outburst and swallowed her tears down as hard as she could, and it was easy because her fury went right back down in the face of her hopelessness. “Shit, I need that back,” she said, and rubbed her face. “I deserved that,” she told herself, and flopped back down into her chair, curling into herself.</p><p>Geralt came over and held out the crystal she’d thrown. She was still working on bottling all her misery back up, so she stayed curled up for a moment, looking blindly at the floor, before she finally had enough control to hold her hand out. He set the crystal gently into her hand and she closed her eyes against a fresh welling of tears.</p><p>He sat down next to her, and put his hand, <em>fuck</em>, put his hand on her back where she was more or less bent double over her own knees, and she didn’t need that, she didn’t need him to hold her like a child. “Fuck you,” she said, because now she was going to have to make a new illusion to cover up that she’d been crying. But he didn’t take his hand away.</p><p>It wasn’t sleazy, it wasn’t a come-on, and maybe that was why she’d fucked him in the first place, because even when he <em>was </em>sleazy he wasn’t any good at it and it was sort of charming. He was so fucking <em>decent</em>. Ugh.</p><p>“What is it?” he asked quietly.</p><p>She just breathed for a moment, until she had herself more or less under control, and said, “Really it’s your fault.”</p><p>“What’s my fault?” he asked, patient and amused and fucking smug.</p><p>“You warp Destiny,” she said. “I was supposed to get caught in one of Radovid’s fucking witch-hunts, I was supposed to die of it. I figured that out afterward. And you interfered, so it didn’t happen.”</p><p>“How do you know this?” Geralt asked, very patient and not at all patronizing. Fuck, he used that tone on godlings and children and rock trolls and hysterical witnesses and, when the younger Witcher was being difficult, Lambert; Keira knew him just well enough to know that.</p><p>She got herself enough under control that she could sit up. Geralt’s hand slid down her back a little, and then he moved slightly closer, putting his arm around her. He smelled, improbably, of expensive Nilfgaardian soap, and expensive leather cleaner, all very mild and tasteful. Oh, he’d done well for himself, here. But he still wasn’t leaning in, he wasn’t being sleazy, he was just holding her, comfortingly.</p><p>“I’m a mage,” she said, “I know how prophesy works. But it doesn’t matter. I’d just like to put in a request now, that if I have to be executed, I’d prefer beheading, rather than burning or impalement. Can you have them put that in my dossier?”</p><p>“I can,” he said, both amused and concerned. “I don’t think anyone’s going to execute you now, though.”</p><p>It wasn’t worth debating. “I’m glad you feel that way,” she said, patting his knee. “At any rate, I left Lambert getting reacquainted with Aiden, in a safe house I’d arranged, so you won’t be hearing from him for a while.”</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Geralt was leaning in the doorway when Ciri looked up, and if she looked half so insolent when she did it then she counted herself fortunate. He had the aspect of having been there for ages by the time she noticed him, but she knew he couldn’t have been there more than half a minute or less.</p><p>“I just have to finish this,” she said. Asking him to sit down would sound too much like Emhyr. “You look comfortable there.”</p><p>“Palace life is terrible for your situational awareness,” he said, predictably.</p><p>“It’s terrible for a lot of things,” she said. “Did you have something that needed my attention?”</p><p>“Keira Metz is waiting to see you,” he said. “I didn’t know if they’d mentioned it to you yet. I rather think she startled some of the household staff by her appearance and so in retaliation they haven’t exactly hastened to make her comfortable.”</p><p>Ciri blinked at him. “Keira,” she said, alarmed. “What’s she doing here?”</p><p>“She came to turn herself in for murder,” Geralt said.</p><p>“Who did she murder?” Ciri demanded.</p><p>“Oh,” Geralt said nonchalantly, looking at his fingernails, which were undoubtedly filthy, “she murdered the rogue mage who was keeping Lambet’s fella Aiden as a pet.”</p><p>Ciri stood up. “<em>What</em>,” she said, sharply enough that her inkwell trembled and her water glass let out a hum as it vibrated.</p><p>“Yeah,” Geralt said, and nodded, matter-of-fact. “So her location spells couldn’t turn up Aiden’s body and kept giving her weird results and so she looked into it more and the reason she couldn’t find his body was that it was still animate.”</p><p>“And a mage was keeping him as a <em>pet</em>,” Ciri said, incredulous and horrified.</p><p>“Apparently the control spells she was using on him were so nasty that only the original caster could remove them without damage,” Geralt said. “So Keira had to pretend to be a friend, and under the pretense of wanting to get a better look at him, convinced her to take the control spells off.”</p><p>“And then killed the mage,” Ciri concluded.</p><p>“Just so,” Geralt said. “But she seems to suddenly be a big fan of law and order and seems very keen on consulting with the proper authorities about this. Methinks she’s spent too long being witch-hunted; she broke down and confessed to me that she believes she’s going to die by execution. I have a sneaking suspicion she has not slept well.”</p><p>“She believes this, does she,” Ciri said.</p><p>“Something about destiny,” Geralt said, waving a hand. “Claims to have dreamed true. At any rate, she was quite distraught, and while I half-expected her to use her distress to manipulate me, she seems-- and I say <em>seems</em>-- remorseful for having manipulated me in the past, so.” He shrugged.</p><p>Ciri considered the phrase <em>dreamed true</em> and then considered that Metz was an Aretuza-educated mage from back when that used to mean something, and said, “Geralt, if she dreamed true, she’s likely not just making it up.” She shook her head a little. “You’ve seen me prophesy people’s deaths before. Forseeing your own would be terrifying.”</p><p>Geralt’s gaze sharpened on her face. “If you’ve seen mine again, don’t tell me,” he said.</p><p>“I haven’t, since the last time, as it happens,” she said. “I think you and Destiny have a. Different relationship, than many. Possibly because of that first intervention?”</p><p>Geralt blinked, then scowled. “That’s what Keira said, that I warp Destiny.”</p><p>Ciri shrugged. “She’s not an idiot, Geralt,” she said.</p><p>“She asked me to put in a good word for her,” he said. “If you’re going to have her executed over this she’d like to pick beheading.”</p><p>“Why would I execute her?” Ciri asked, baffled. “For rescuing Aiden from some lunatic?” And it struck her, then-- “Oh Gods, how is Lambert?”</p><p>“She says she left them in a safehouse getting reacquainted,” Geralt said, “and now that I think about it, probably one of them actually did the killing, given my experience of Keira and my general knowledge of, you know, Lambert-- so she’s here to take the rap for some reason, and I can’t work out what her game is, but it’s possible she’s actually lost her mind.”</p><p>“She’s not an idiot,” Ciri said. “If she’s dreamed her own death true she may be trying to exert some control over it and get it over with. I’m almost sorry to disappoint her, but not really; it’s a rare event for a mage to grow a conscience and I’d hate to discourage it.”</p>
<hr/><p>Lambert had heard the expression “a sight for sore eyes” before and hadn’t really understood it until now, but being in Aiden’s presence felt like something that had hurt a long time suddenly not hurting anymore, and it wasn’t just the sense of sight, it was all of it-- his scent, the sound of his voice, just his physical presence, it was like it all filled a void in Lambert’s soul.</p><p>It didn’t fit neatly, was the thing-- the void wasn’t quite the right size and shape anymore and it kind of hurt in a whole new way to fit him back in there. It was a lot to take in, was what it amounted to, and it was probably for the best that Aiden had lost consciousness and left Lambert this time to himself to think without having to let go of him.</p><p>Thing about Aiden was, he was a light sleeper most of the time, like any Witcher, but if you got him in some safe den, once in a while, he slept like he was dead. Which, now, jokes about him being dead weren’t funny, but it was easier to handle with him a warm heavy weight, entirely limp, breathing slow and so deeply he was almost snoring.</p><p>He still smelled a little like the mage’s house, like alchemy and stale perfume and suffering. But he also smelled of himself, his own sweat and his own skin and his own spend. And now he smelled a bit like Lambert, which was better, and like Lambert’s spend, which was even more ideal. Even the faint hint of the spent potions working their way out of Lambert’s system was reassuring, like things were normal, like they were on the Path together curled up somewhere between jobs.</p><p>But Aiden’s hands were far too clean, uncallused; his body was more or less in its normal state with his usual distribution of fat and muscle, showing that he’d been eating well enough and had been within his normal range of activity. She hadn’t had him locked in a box the whole time. He did have some new scars-- some on his face, around that horrible not-an-eye in his head, which now gleamed a little disquietingly under the edge of his eyelid-- and some, notably, on both of his wrists. It wasn’t-- it wasn’t like he’d slit his wrists or anything, nothing so clean as that, but they weren’t shackle-marks either. It almost looked like <em>teeth</em> marks, like something had managed to bite him just there, and really maul him, thick seams of mangled-and-healed flesh-- without mauling the backs of his arms, though. Just the undersides.</p><p>Could be his own teeth. Wasn’t something Lambert wanted to think about too much. Aiden had wicked-sharp teeth, sharper even than Lambert’s.</p><p>After a while, Aiden was so slack with sleep Lambert could crawl out of the bed, put his clothes back on-- he wished for that robe, wished he had brought any luggage, really-- and went into the kitchen to make something to eat. Aiden hadn’t seemed hungry, but Lambert was ravenous. So he started off by taking an inventory of what there was.</p><p>There was a lot. Well, for two Witchers, rather than one Witcher and one mage who ate like a bird, it was probably enough for a week or two, but it was a lot of food. Keira had stocked this place like she’d stocked their other house-- and there was her usual trick, a few pots of premade stuff clearly under preservation charms, which he didn’t want to touch lest he break the charms and wreck it all, but there was also a ton of the kinds of stuff he liked to cook with. And a little crock of bread dough he could use to start his own loaves, and a huge sack of fine flour to go with it.</p><p>There was a lot of meat, which was-- he’d noticed she tended to pick the meat out of stuff he made, so he’d been making her lighter stuff. There wasn’t any lighter stuff here.</p><p>She hadn’t ever really intended on coming here. She’d known Aiden wouldn’t want to be around her. She’d obviously given this a lot more thought than Lambert had. Fuck, she was smart.</p><p>He took a moment to be worried about her. She’d been weird, through all of this, and her panic attacks and night terrors were getting worse, and he didn’t know what to do about it.</p><p>It wasn’t like he could ask Aiden; Aiden was going to need a bit to get over the very reasonable paranoia. The thing about Aiden was that he was generally a sensible person, but he was resistant to being <em>told</em> things. The way to get him to accept Keira was to keep acting normal with her, and let him observe how that went. They were off to a good start, and giving him a little space was probably smart, but the way forward was to just keep on.</p><p>He finished his inventory, broke the preservation charms on a good hunk of high-quality beef that must’ve been pretty expensive, and set it out on the counter. He assembled vegetables and flour and assorted other ingredients until he was pretty satisfied with the meal concept, and then went to look for a kitchen towel or something, since he was going to make a mess.</p><p>There was a trunk full of kitchen linens, which was great-- nice high-quality linen towels in varying sizes and varying finenesses-- but there was also an apron in there with a thick line of colorful flowered embroidery on it, and he had to stand there a minute and stare at it because it wasn’t his but it was exactly the kind of shit he liked, and she’d bought that for him. It wasn’t mixed in, it had been folded separately. She hadn’t just bought this trunk full of assorted kitchen linens with this unknowingly folded in, by coincidence-- she’d specifically bought that apron to put in there for him to find.</p><p>Well: he put it on.</p><p>He was starting to get worried, as the food smelled better and better and Aiden didn’t wake up. Once he had it simmering, he came and leaned in the door of the bedroom, and Aiden sat bolt upright in the bed, shoving his back against the wall and staring at Lambert like a caged animal. There was a long tense moment, and then Aiden slumped over and said, “Fuck, Lambert--”</p><p>Lambert came over and sat on the bed and embraced him, and Aiden folded himself awkwardly around Lambert’s body and tucked his face into the corner of his neck and shoulder.</p><p>“Hey,” Lambert said.</p><p>Aiden didn’t answer for a while; he was crying silently, but then he was just shaking, and Lambert kept his fingers light on the bumps of the Cat’s spine, tracing gently up and down, his other hand tucked into the fold where Aiden’s torso bent at the waist. Eventually Aiden’s breathing was steady; Lambert traced his fingers up to the back of Aiden’s neck. His hair was recently-cut, a little shorter than he normally wore it, and had darkened a bit with lack of sunlight. His skin was paler, too, gone oddly milk-white and unhealthy-looking, though he wasn’t at all sick. He’d just… been in a basement for three years.</p><p>Aiden sighed, stirring a bit, and pulled his face out of Lambert’s neck, then stopped short, staring at something. “Ha, what is that,” he said.</p><p>Lambert craned his neck to figure out what Aiden was looking at. Aiden raised his hand and touched Lambert’s medallion.</p><p>Oh, no, it was his own medallion he was touching. “Ah,” Lambert said, “that’s yours.”</p><p>“What the-- where the hell did you get this,” Aiden said, frowning at it.</p><p>Lambert sat up straighter, disentangling himself gently from Aiden’s various limbs, and pulled the medallion off over his head, presenting it to Aiden. He never had gotten around to stringing it on the chain with his, which was just as well.</p><p>“It’s,” Aiden said, blank with shock as he turned it over in his fingers, “it’s-- it’s actually <em>my</em>--”</p><p>“Yeah,” Lambert said. “Well, so. It’s kind of why we found you.”</p><p>Aiden looked up at Lambert disbelievingly. He was running his finger along the rough spot in the casting on the back, an imperfection too small to see but easy enough to feel. “They-- I assumed they took this for the bounty,” he said.</p><p>“Yeah, they did,” Lambert said. “Well, so, here’s the thing, it’s easy to use magic to find, like, specific objects. And since I had other objects that had been yours, Keira could use something about them to find other things of yours. I wanted your medallion and your swords--”</p><p>Aiden sat up sharply. “My fucking sword,” he said. “I sort of-- to be honest I thought I was hallucinating that?”</p><p>“The steel sword had been dismantled,” Lambert said, “but she got me a couple of your knives, and your silver sword and medallion were still in the manor house of the guy who’d taken out the contract on you, but he’d been dead a while and it was some Nilfgaardian government official there now.”</p><p>Aiden turned the medallion over again, shaking his head a little in disbelief. “It’s-- I mean, you can find Cat medallions any old where, they’ve gotta be pretty thick on the ground in some junk shops given how many of my brothers are dead, but this one is <em>actually mine</em>.”</p><p>“Not… yeah,” Lambert said, “but I didn’t want any old Cat medallion, I was only interested if it was really yours.” He gestured vaguely at it. “So. I mean. She did a spell, she found it that way. Something about like a vibration or a, a resonance or something. Anyway. Said it lasts longest in metal and stone, less in wood, least of all in leather and fabric. Something like that. She explained it all to me. See she’s like-- she’s one of those people who’s interested in knowing things for knowing things’ sake and she likes to talk about things she knows and really likes to find things out and. Well.” He trailed off. “I mean,” he said a little lamely. He hadn’t meant to really talk about her; his plan had been to let that subject be for a little bit.</p><p>“You, ah,” Aiden said. “She’s been around a while, huh?”</p><p>“Just the winter,” Lambert said. Well, the subject had been brought up, so it would be dumb to shy away from it. “So uh-- here’s the thing, I was kind of broken up about you and. Well anyway, she told me she could find the medallion, and she did, and then I asked.” He had to steel himself; it sounded crazy in his head. “I asked her if she could find your body. Just-- to know, Aiden, I wanted to know what. What happened. It’s not like I thought it would help but it-- I didn’t like not knowing, right?”</p><p>“Babe,” Aiden said, closing his eyes. He was holding the medallion in both hands. He leaned forward and put his forehead against Lambert’s shoulder, and Lambert put his arms around him. It was a little chilly in here, and Aiden had no shirt on, so his skin felt cold.</p><p>“She needed-- not objects but something of your body, to find you, but I had one of your teeth in a jar, still. And it was a little awkward to try to explain why I had a jar of teeth without explaining exactly why, but.”</p><p>“Oh gods,” Aiden said, muffled against Lambert’s shoulder. “I worked really hard to prevent Halmatia from ever realizing my teeth could grow back. I didn’t succeed, but fortunately she wasn’t quick enough to realize this was something she could exploit.”</p><p>“Keira knows they grow back,” Lambert admitted. “But I didn’t explain why I kept them. I don’t think she figured it out.”</p><p>“Good,” Aiden said.</p><p>“Anyway I gave her the tooth and she did a spell to find your body and…” Lambert rubbed his hand up and down Aiden’s back.</p><p>“No body to find,” Aiden said.</p><p>Lambert shook his head. “I figured it was that you weren’t-- buried, and she’d said that was possible, but. She kept looking, I guess. Didn’t tell me until she was sure, but then she--” He grimaced. “It was a whole thing. I guess she figured I’d run off if she told me straight-out.”</p><p>“Wait, that party,” Aiden said, a bit distantly. “I remember that. Everyone seemed surprised she was there.”</p><p>“She was there for you,” Lambert said. “I, it killed me not to go, but she was right, what would I have done there? So I sat around at home and pretty much bit all my nails off, but.”</p><p>“You do what she tells you,” Aiden said, surprised. He sat back slightly to look into Lambert’s face.</p><p>“Well,” Lambert said. “I.” He sighed. “So the thing is. When she found your medallion it wasn’t like it was just lying on the ground somewhere. Someone had it. So she said I should let her get it back, but I insisted on taking care of it myself.”</p><p>“Subtlety <em>is</em> your strong suit,” Aiden said.</p><p>“Both Keira and Ciri had to come spring me out of jail,” Lambert admitted. “And I felt bad about it. Keira’s been in hiding ever since, fuck, I dunno, probably whenever it was that Radovid started burning mages, and it scared her pretty badly to have to come talk to government officials to get me out.”</p><p>“Why would a <em>mage</em> be afraid of a government official?” Aiden asked, unimpressed.</p><p>“They took down Aretuza,” Lambert said. “Tortured the instructors to death. I think one survived, she’s pretty messed-up. Burned all the students one at a time.”</p><p>“... Fuck,” Aiden said, “I forgot.”</p><p>“Most of Keira’s friends are dead,” Lambert said quietly. “I haven’t asked for details. She’s-- I wasn’t kidding, Aiden, it’s pretty likely that a lot of the reason nobody caught on to what your mage was doing is that all the other fucking mages are dead.”</p><p>Aiden put his medallion on over his head, and adjusted it so it lay between his collarbones. “So she’s the only reason you found me,” he said.</p><p>“If I had known to look,” Lambert said, all his guilt coming crashing back. He’d left Aiden to his fate for three fucking years. He’d never thought to search for him at all. “But it seemed ironclad. I had an eyewitness to Karadin handing over the stuff for the bounty-- okay it was a secondhand eyewitness, told me what their brother had seen. Described the bloody medallion in great detail, told me the silver sword was in its scabbard but the steel one wasn’t. Said your head was there but obviously that didn’t happen-- either the brother embellished it, or the second teller did, or-- I didn’t think to double-check that because it seemed pretty tight.”</p><p>“Understandable,” Aiden said, clearly repenting of having seemed harsh a moment before, but Lambert didn’t let him get any more words in.</p><p>“And I hunted down all the people involved in killing you,” he went on. “You’d think one of them would’ve told me the truth to save their own skins! They tried all kinds of lies on Geralt.”</p><p>Aiden shook his head. “Bet most of them didn’t know,” he said. “Like Karadin wouldn’t have tried to cheat them out of the extra cash from selling me still alive-- I bet he had a buyer in mind from the beginning and figured on cutting the others out. That was how he always was.”</p><p>“Filth,” Lambert said, and spat on the floor, even though they were indoors so he was going to have to clean that up later or step in it.</p><p>“Hey,” Aiden said, and caught Lambert by the shoulder. “I’m not mad. I’m not mad that you didn’t know to find me. It’s not your fault. You didn’t do this to me.”</p><p>Lambert had meant to be a lot more indirect about this. “Well,” he said, “but it just points out, I did fucking nothing, that was all Keira. I would never have known. Or, if I did, I would’ve run in there and she’d’ve killed you rather than hand you over. Only Keira had the brass fucking balls to pretend she was into it and go in there and fake-smile at that monster.”</p><p>“I believed her,” Aiden said, looking a little haunted. “The things she said-- I thought she had you in a cage, too.”</p><p>“You still do,” Lambert said, then realized that was way too obvious. He stood up, suddenly. “Hey I made food. Come eat it.”</p><p>Aiden looked up at him, considering. “Yeah, okay,” he said.</p>
<hr/>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The world turns on, and on we go, and now 2020's up to second place in my total wordcount stats so that's nice. Goal achieved. </p><p>I love all of you guys and thanks for the kind comments and various supports.</p><p>Update: YES the bit where Aiden's discussing what a jerk Karadin is and how he cheated the others is meant to be a direct homage to Anoke's <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25129732">fic that tells that story and that's exactly what happened</a>, I FORGOT i was going to explain that!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hey, thanks, past me, for not having chapter titles. whew!<br/>So this is a short chapter, because the next chunk is chapter-length on its own, so I'll put up the next chunk pretty soon. Thanks for reading, I'll see you in a bit!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p>Keira had watched Lambert meditate a couple of times by now, and had even dipped lightly into reading his thoughts to try to figure out what he was really doing. Meditation made him a calm blank presence, no actual words anywhere near the surface of his mind.  It hid all his magical presence, and tamped down even the electrical activity of his body, near as she could tell-- his complete stillness made him hard to see for predators whose vision favored movement, and his cooled-down body temperature tamped down his scent, she thought, and-- in general, it was as close as a person could come to not existing, while still alive, and it was <em>fascinating</em> and she had had to force herself not to pay too close attention because obviously it was something he did when he wanted to be at peace and alone. </p>
<p>At the moment, she was imagining what that must be like, because she herself had never learned to meditate, and any of the other means she had of calming herself would be too obvious. So she stood for a while in a nice beech grove in a sheltered nook deep in the Tukaj Hills, in fact the very beech grove she’d duplicated to put into her bedroom, and leaned on a tree trunk and thought about the way Lambert’s mind felt while he was meditating, and tried to make herself as calm and strong and whatever as she could figure out how to be.</p>
<p>She was so gods-damned tired, and so distressed, and so frightened, and she had to go and brazen her way through asking fucking Philippa fucking Eilhart for a fucking favor.</p>
<p>Emperor Emhyr had not deigned to execute her and now she was on the hook to come back and talk to Cirilla about some sort of independent governing body for mages, which was important and in which she believed strongly but at the moment it seemed overwhelmingly, entirely too much to contemplate. </p>
<p>She really wanted to just sit on the mossy floor and cry for a while, but it was a juvenile impulse and not a productive one. Probably she could cry for three or four days and still not reach the end of her need for it, so it was futile to attempt it. </p>
<p>She let herself sit in the moss for a moment, and stared at her hands, which Lambert had healed, with the Sign she’d taught him. He’d held them so gently, his callused hands so big and so warm, and she-- well, she fucking <em>missed</em> him and it had been less than a day and she was being a big baby.</p>
<p>He and Aiden were probably fucking right now, and it was just as well she hadn’t left herself any clever little spells to spy on them with because she would absolutely watch them and that would be wrong.</p>
<p>(Would Lambert put his hand around the back of Aiden’s neck like he did for her? Would he hold both their cocks and rub them like he had for her? Probably he’d spit on his hand first, and--)</p>
<p>She forcibly broke off the train of thought and made herself stand up.  Her chest hurt so badly, and she had given up at trying to diagnose what was wrong. She had <em>known</em>, he had <em>told</em> her he’d only ever loved one person, and then for some reason she’d damn near killed herself to get him that one person back, and she was an idiot and didn’t understand her own decisions about this and that was that. </p>
<p>She had been <em>fine</em> on her own for <em>decades</em> and this had just been a brief detour, a pleasant fantasy of a winter playing at being somebody’s girlfriend. Now she had big important things to do and she was going to come out of exile with a new and prestigious position and it was time to move the fuck on, and let go, and-- well, but she had to help Aiden get a new eye first, and that was what she was up to now.</p>
<p>Once her breathing had settled, she got herself together and set up her megascope to call Philippa. </p>
<p>“Yes,” Philippa agreed, “this is an unprecedented opportunity.” She paused; she’d been pacing around the room. She’d insisted on meeting at her old crumbling ruin of a stronghold in Montecalvo, having determined immediately that a megascope call was no way to conduct such important business. Keira had only agreed to go because she didn’t feel she had much choice. At least there were several rooms with largely-intact roofs. “It’s so interesting that you’ve apparently called me before Yennefer; I thought you and she were getting along so well.”</p>
<p>Keira had to turn to look at her, to take in the precise degree of her head tilt, but she’d been trying not to obsessively follow Philippa with her eyes. The older mage surely knew Keira was afraid of her, but equally surely would take her showing it as a sign of weakness. Whether she knew Keira and Yennefer had fucked or not was up for debate here, but she did at least know they’d met up, and it was unnerving. As it was <em>supposed</em> to be, Keira thought, and admonished herself not to give in this easily; this had always been how Philippa operated.</p>
<p>“I have reason to believe that Cirilla will loop Yennefer in on her own,” she said, “given that the Crown Princess rather openly considers their relationship something next to maternal.” She gave an elaborate shrug. That wasn’t a secret. “It just didn’t seem like something <em>I</em> needed to take charge of?”</p>
<p>“True,” Philippa mused. “Well, I won’t hold my breath for Cirilla to come directly to me, either.”</p>
<p>“I was rather hoping I could set up some kind of conference,” Keira said. “But, as you’re doubtless <em>truly</em> asking, I do also have another reason I wanted to speak to you specifically, and it’s your experience with eye replacements, not to dance around it too delicately.”</p>
<p>Philippa blinked innocently-- oh yes, her eyes looked entirely normal, though they weren’t quite the shade they had been-- and smiled. “What possible need would you have of this expertise?”</p>
<p>The trick was not to want it too badly, but Keira had never been good at that. “A friend,” she sighed. “Lost an eye in an accident, and another mage made him a terribly crude replacement using Vilgefortz’s technique with a gemstone, and it’s badly done and painful and doesn’t work all that well, and I said I’d look into making improvements.”</p>
<p>“Because you haven’t had enough to worry about, lately,” Philippa said, eyebrows raised.</p>
<p>Keira shrugged. “Well,” she said, “the knowledge exists, it seems the least I can do is ask if you have any notes about it, or advice for me. It’d be a shame for him to suffer when I could just as easily help.”</p>
<p>Philippa gave her an amused once-over. “What sort of friend is this?” she said.</p>
<p>Keira knew not to shrug again, as repeating a gesture like that would give Philippa too much insight into how nervous she was. She spread her hands instead. “I have several friends,” she said. “How much detail do you want? Shall I explain our entire process of becoming acquainted? I simply hadn’t thought you interested in my personal life, Philippa, but as it happens, I met Cirilla through Geralt, and in the process of defending Cirilla against the Wild Hunt, I met Geralt’s brother Lambert, with whom I’ve become good friends, and he lately involved me in the search for a missing friend of his, who I helped discover, and it’s this missing friend who’s down an eye, and it’s all been this peripatetic little adventure which is all very amusing to relate but I simply hadn’t thought you interested. We should properly have tea to talk it over, and you can catch me up on who you’ve been keeping with lately, I’d be delighted to hear all about it, preferably in a room with windows that can close.” Philippa had a spell keeping the wind somewhat blocked, but there was no overlooking that the panes had fallen out of the windows of this room.</p>
<p>“Of course your personal life concerns me,” Philippa said, not warmly but not coldly either. “There are so few of us left, and I keep track of who is still safe and whose existence is precarious. I haven’t been able to help, in the past, but the more of us who have safe places to be, the more of each other we can save.”</p>
<p>“This is a fair point,” Keira conceded.</p>
<p>“I had followed your entrance into the fold of those favored by Geralt of Rivia with great interest,” Philippa said, “as you well know how much influence he seems to wield, nowadays.”</p>
<p>“That he does,” Keira said. Possibly the worst thing about Philippa was how reasonable she intermittently was. It was how she lured you into letting her do you a favor, for which she would then demand some wild repayment at the most inopportune time. She’d nailed Keira this way several times, and was inevitably going to do so again. Possibly the endgame here would be related to taking over Keira’s apparently-chummy position with Cirilla. Keira was more or less resigned to it, but had some hope it would at least take a couple of years to play out.</p>
<p>“I heard a rumor of your attendance at a soiree in Ebbyng,” Philippa said, “and the subsequent abrupt disappearance of a minor sorceress named Halmatia Haltzenfaff. Now, she’d been up to some fairly nasty things, in my estimation, and I’d rather thought it a matter of time before someone stopped her, but I admit I hadn’t expected, firstly, that it would be quite such a drastic undertaking to stop her, nor secondly that it would be you.”</p>
<p>“It was me,” Keira said. “That was what began the conversation with Cirilla.”</p>
<p>“What did you tell her Halmatia had done to you?” Philippa asked.</p>
<p>“I didn’t have to come up with anything,” Keira said. “I told her the truth and showed her what I’d retrieved from her labs.”</p>
<p>“What prompted you to involve yourself?” Philippa asked.</p>
<p>Keira felt a cold clenching sensation in her midsection. Which of Halmatia’s projects had Philippa been involved with? Surely Halmatia had not known, or she would have mentioned it in her bragging. “Was it the mind control?” she wondered aloud. “She did have a number of sentients captive in her basement. I mean, I kept all her notes, and I’ve been working on transcribing them. Her encoding wasn’t very good. She wasn’t terribly gifted, Philippa, and she somehow made it through Aretuza without even a rudimentary knowledge of focus objects.”</p>
<p>“Was it your soft heart that prompted you?” Philippa asked, very faintly mocking.</p>
<p>“Well, my friend’s friend was one of the sentients captive in the basement,” Keira said. “So, you certainly weren’t sharing information with her or she’d’ve done better at replacing his eye.” She tapped her finger to her chin. “If you were interested in many of her projects I’m afraid she wasn’t very good at designing experiments. I’ve salvaged as much data as I could but much of it is pretty seriously flawed.”</p>
<p>“I wasn’t working with her,” Philippa said, mildly offended, possibly acting. “She was just on my mental map, and I was somewhat surprised to find that her entire house had been violently exploded.”</p>
<p>“She set a ridiculously overpowered golem on me,” Keira said mildly. “She tortured several people to death, and had this friend’s friend captive under mind control through intermittent torture for several years. One might almost forgive, if there were significant strides in scientific advancements being made, but she had nothing to show for it but a lot of very self-important, heavily-fictionalized notes, and not much else.”</p>
<p>“Hm,” Philippa said.</p>
<p>“I feel rigorousness in experimental design is not taught properly anymore,” Keira said, warming to her topic slightly. “How can you get good, consistently-reproducible results if your variables aren’t consistent?”</p>
<p>“A fair point,” Philippa conceded.</p>
<p>“And ethics in experiment design has to be considered,” Keira said, “or else the local authorities are going to feel justified in the use of the stake. I’d quite like to avoid that, for one. We’ve got to come up with some kind of codification of that, to stop people declaring us monsters quite so often.”</p>
<p>“Hm,” Philippa said. Keira knew fine well, as did everyone, that Radovid V’s vendetta against mages had begun while Philippa was given authority over him when he was a minor. It was because of her being such a monster to him, that all of them had been declared monsters, and so many had been killed. That was why he’d gouged her eyes out when he got the chance, and had gone on from that to all of the burnings and other executions. He’d been a madman, but he hadn’t gone mad for no reason.</p>
<p>But that didn’t have to be said, really. Keira shrugged. “It seems we have an opportunity,” she said lightly, “to prove ourselves worthy of a sympathetic regime, given that Cirilla herself is a formidable sorceress.”</p>
<p>“Who trained her, though,” Philippa said. “She hasn’t much control over her powers, as far as I understand it.”</p>
<p>“She seems to be gaining more every time I see her,” Keira said. “She’s certainly mastered translocation, though I don’t think she uses portals the way the rest of us do. She’s very powerful, and very unusual, and for all that, she’s both clever and considerate. I like her a great deal and look forward to working with her.”</p>
<p>“<em>Do</em> you,” Philippa said. “Do you anticipate being the head of this new order of mages, then?”</p>
<p>“I would prefer not to be,” Keira said. “You know fine well politics isn’t my strong suit.”</p>
<p>“Then just what <em>is</em> your ambition, dearest?” Philippa asked. </p>
<p>Keira shook her head. “I want to do research,” she said, “I want a chance to heal from my terror of the pyre. I want to-- well, I want to help this friend, with his eye,” not that dragging it back around to him was likely to be constructive, but, well, she had to try. “Is it so implausible that I only want enough power to ensure I’m not subject to execution on a whim?”</p>
<p>Philippa gave her a long, measuring look. This close, Keira could see that there was a glamor on her eyes, a slight sheen of illusion. She made no attempt to see through it. Aiden wouldn’t care what his eye looked like, she rather thought. At any rate, it couldn’t possibly look <em>worse</em> than it did. </p>
<p>“It is not in any way implausible,” Philippa said, with a curl of dry amusement that made it plain that she considered this rather a condemnation of Keira’s character. But, so be it; it wasn’t as if Keira hadn’t put her life on the line for her in the past, and it had achieved nothing. Philippa didn’t do loyalty, really. </p>
<p>And <em>that</em>, that was what Keira really wanted-- she wanted to be loyal to someone or something, and just stop thinking about it. She was tired of being on her own and constantly looking out for herself and always trying to manipulate people to come out ahead. She was exhausted. She wanted to throw her lot in with someone.</p>
<p>Maybe she could convince Philippa she’d do that for her, but it wasn’t likely, having been burned so badly before-- even if Philippa thought she was stupid, which she did, she couldn’t possibly fall for Keira being <em>that</em> stupid. But she might believe that Keira was just that tired. Because she was. </p>
<p>“So can we come to an arrangement?” Keira asked. “Your notes, on eyes, in exchange for…?”</p>
<p>Philippa smiled, self-satisfied. “I’m quite sure we can,” she said.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>warnings: There's a brief indirect mention of past noncon, thought no details. <br/>Aiden is consistently going to misgender Keira, because he hasn't been told.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Aiden’s medallion pulsed sharply and he had rolled to his feet before he’d even really figured out what he was reacting to. Lambert had started up, as well; clearly, his had also alerted him.</p>
<p>“Portal,” Lambert said, “felt like?”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Aiden said, and the fact that he had his medallion and a sword to go for-- and a knife, the long one he’d always kept at his back, Lambert had given him that one back too-- well, all of it felt so normal he had to just stand there and breathe a moment, especially as Lambert didn’t seem the slightest bit alarmed. Lambert was something of an expert at telling what his medallion was reacting to, though; Aiden remembered, now, all the charts he’d made back when Triss had lived at Kaer Morhen, training Ciri.</p>
<p>Lambert and his fucking charts. Probably, the orgasms they’d traded earlier in the day were in a chart by now, data encoded with details only Lambert had ever noticed, and he would be extrapolating it into a pattern within the week.</p>
<p>“Likely, it’s Keira,” Lambert said. “Which is good, since I made food for her too.”</p>
<p>Aiden hadn’t been sure of it until this moment, but he was now. “You’re fucking,” he said mildly, a little surprised at his own certainty.</p>
<p>Lambert blinked at him, frowned slightly, then grimaced. “Yeah,” he said. “Fuck, I shoulda-- I didn’t want to, like,<em> lead</em> with that but now it looks like I was hiding it. Fuck--”</p>
<p>“Calm down,” Aiden said. He shouldn’t have just blurted it out like that. In his right mind he wouldn’t have, but everything was-- well, he wasn’t really at his best, at the moment. “It’s not like I’d have any right to be jealous, the number of other people I--” He paused midsentence, a flash of memory unsettling him-- those parties, where Halmatia made him-- well it hadn’t ever been <em>him</em>, just his body, but he still--</p>
<p>“I never did, though,” Lambert said grimly. He went to the door; there were footsteps on the path, someone walking slowly, heavily-laden. “Means something that I did, and we should’ve talked about that.”</p>
<p>“We’re fine,” Aiden said quickly, as Lambert opened the door. “You, and me, don’t worry about that.” At his best or not, he still retained some of his basic Lambert-Handling Precepts, and one of them was not to leave Lambert to mull over things he didn’t need to mull, unless it was funny. This wasn’t funny.</p>
<p>It wasn’t about the sex, though, it was about how entangled Lambert was with an incredibly dangerous mage who certainly could control him on levels he might not even realize. Well, <em>and </em>the sex-- because one of the fundamental precepts of Lambert was that he didn’t fuck anyone he wasn’t pretty emotionally involved with. So this was a fairly alarming realization to come to, so abruptly, with so little chance to discuss it.</p>
<p>It was the mage herself out there after all, coming up the path in the dark, and she had a bag over her shoulder and a basket in the other hand and from the way she was walking both were quite heavy and she was limping a little. Aiden had never seen Halmatia carry anything heavy in the whole time he’d known her; she had magic for that, and servants for the rest. Combined with the woman’s incongruously flawless appearance, including a bodice that was open so far down her chest her breasts couldn’t possibly stay put without magic and a hairstyle that wouldn’t hold up to the lightest exertion, her exhausted body language made no sense. She had to be putting this on.</p>
<p>But Lambert made an annoyed noise of dismay, and went straight out to help her, and, resigned, Aiden followed.</p>
<p>She was pretty, of course she was, but he couldn’t see how that would turn Lambert’s head. A lot of women were pretty. It wasn’t that Lambert didn’t like women. Pretty women flustered him adorably, and he tended to be too defensive about it to be charming to them, which Aiden privately figured was part of the reason he had so little success with them.</p>
<p>But the main thing about Lambert and women, or Lambert and anybody really, was that Lambert didn’t fuck people for fun. He only fucked people he cared about a lot, and in their line of work there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for getting to care about people. If he was fucking this mage, either he cared about her a lot or she’d put him under some spell, and that was that.</p>
<p>“It’s-- fine,” the mage said, resignedly, letting Lambert take the bag from her shoulder. Aiden stepped forward and took the basket, and she rolled her eyes but smiled at him politely. He could-- he had an odd flash of double-vision, and blinked as he readjusted.</p>
<p>“I can tell you overdid it,” Lambert said. “You want to tell us where you had to run off to like that?”</p>
<p>His artificial eye, Aiden realized-- he’d sort of noticed before, but now it was more obvious, in the firelight spilling from the doorway. It didn’t see... illusions? His real eye saw her as the flawlessly-attired creature she clearly was spelled to appear; his artificial eye was giving him a slightly-distorted view that showed some of the magical underpinnings of the look, including a spell-mesh active across her chest and some smudges around her hair and face.</p>
<p>Well. That was interesting.</p>
<p>“I’ll explain in a moment,” the mage said, and stumbled, and Aiden read Lambert’s body language and stepped in to take the bag from him too.</p>
<p>Lambert bent and grabbed the mage around the waist, lifting her easily. “No, you--” she said, startled, and let out an undignified squeak as he hefted her to settle her into position against his chest. “Oh for the goddess’s sake, Lambert, don’t be like this.”</p>
<p>“I’m always like this,” Lambert said. “Or would you rather I carried you over my shoulder like a sack?”</p>
<p>“This is stupid,” she said, “and I’d punch you in the balls if I could reach.”</p>
<p>“That’s why you can’t reach,” he said, smug. Aiden pushed the door open, stood to the side, let them in, and then closed the door after them, staying in the shadows. She hadn’t really even looked at him yet. Lambert put her down in the chair by the fire, and she half-heartedly threatened to punch him, and he skipped backward out of range. Aiden set the basket down on the table and the bag on the floor, and frowned at the bag when it clunked.</p>
<p>“I brought some of the things I thought you might like from back at the house,” the mage said, “since I-- well, I rather thought Aiden was going to need more time to heal, but he looks all right.”</p>
<p>“We rested today, mostly,” Lambert said. “Where the fuck have you been?”</p>
<p>He went and got her a bowl of the thing he’d made that was still warm by the fire. He’d made two things, one of which the pair of them had devoured, and the other of which Aiden had assumed was for later.</p>
<p>“Oh, I’m not,” she said, as he tried to hand her the bowl, “I wasn’t going to-- I don’t need--”</p>
<p>“Eat,” Lambert said, annoyed. “I can smell that you haven’t eaten all day.”</p>
<p>Lambert’s nose was far more acute than Aiden’s, but since no one was looking at him, Aiden stepped forward a little and took a good deep taste of the air with his mouth a little open. (He’d mastered the art of just parting his lips a little, tongue pushed up to get the air to flow over it, so that it wasn’t obvious when he did it. Somehow Lambert didn’t need to use his tongue, too, to get a clear scent, but Aiden did, and Lambert made fun of him so he didn’t do it when Lambert was looking, except for humorous effect.)</p>
<p>It was hard to fake a scent, and the mage smelled awful-- stressed, frightened, exhausted, miserable, and yeah, there was the unmistakable bitter scent of food deprivation.</p>
<p>So that lined up with what the illusions were hiding. She really had been limping, and she really was tired and overextended. It would be hard to fake the scent of that, and she seemed to be trying to hide her vulnerability, instead. So this wasn’t a play for sympathy… or was it?</p>
<p>“So can I,” Aiden put in, when her expression went mulish. She blinked in surprise, and looked at him, but it had disarmed her somewhat.</p>
<p>“If <em>you</em> can smell it, it <em>must</em> be bad,” Lambert said.</p>
<p>“Fuck you,” Aiden said genially, “I’m backing you up here,” which was true.</p>
<p>She gave him a wary, considering look, but then took the bowl, which pacified Lambert enough that he came over and started to poke through the bag.</p>
<p>“So what was so urgent that you had to do today?” Lambert asked. The bag held a spare steel sword, assorted clothing, a spare pair of boots.</p>
<p>“Some of that might fit you, Aiden,” the mage said, a bit diffidently. “I thought-- I didn’t have much to hand, and some of it is just Lambert’s spares, but I thought you probably wouldn’t want to just wear that same thing all the time. I did find a few of your things at Halmatia’s before I destroyed the place, but I rather thought they needed washing and I didn’t have time to take care of that today. I’ll bring them another day. And I know you’ve-- Lambert said you had different tastes in swords, but I thought one of his spares was better than nothing.”</p>
<p>“Actually,” Lambert said, “I’ll need my spare silver one, that golem did a number on mine.”</p>
<p>“Ah,” she said. She took a deep breath, let it slowly out, and nodded to herself. “Give it here, I’ll see if I can’t repair it.”</p>
<p>“No,” Lambert said, “there’s-- don’t, Keira, it’s fine. We came through town to get here, there’s a blacksmith who looked competent. Non-magical repairs tend to hold up better anyway.”</p>
<p>“Oh,” she said.</p>
<p>“Please, eat,” Lambert said, “and then tell me where you went, I don’t know what the fuck is going on and I hate that.”</p>
<p>The mage sighed heavily, and began to eat. Lambert went and got her a cup of small beer and set it on the table next to her elbow, and pulled up a chair on the other side of the hearth to wait for her to speak.</p>
<p>Aiden decided lurking in the shadows wasn’t constructive, so he pulled a chair over next to Lambert and made himself comfortable, propping his feet up on the brace at the lower part of the legs of Lambert’s chair. He knew it would annoy Lambert when he noticed it, which was why he did it. But Lambert was busy pouring them both cups of beer, and only noticed when he handed the cup to Aiden.</p>
<p>“You’re a menace with those shanks,” Lambert groused, but didn’t make him move.</p>
<p>Maybe having been dead had its perks. “I fucking <em>died</em>, Lambert,” Aiden said in a faux-aggrieved tone, adjusting his position in a way that jostled Lambert’s chair.</p>
<p>“Too soon, asshole,” Lambert said.</p>
<p>Aiden folded his hands across his belly and tilted his head down so he could watch the mage under his eyebrows. She was eating slowly and watching the by-play between the two of them with a wary sort of fascination. “Am I annoying you enough for you to let her off the hook?” he asked.</p>
<p>“No,” Lambert said, “I’m just letting her eat before I resume my interrogation.”</p>
<p>“Well,” Aiden said. “Let’s reason out where she’d’ve gone today, and she can tell us if we were right. I’m guessing that exploding Halmatia’s house was likely to piss somebody off, so you had to talk to someone about that.”</p>
<p>“Mm,” the mage said, “it was more the murder part of it than the property damage. I thought of framing her for having accidentally caused her own death, but decided it would set too dangerous a precedent, and I suspected another mage was behind some of her wilder experiments, and I was correct about that.”</p>
<p>“Another mage,” Lambert said.</p>
<p>“Ah,” Aiden said, “she had people over all the time. None of them seemed very important, to me, but then, she’d’ve been able to make me forget about anyone who was.”</p>
<p>“She could have,” the mage said thoughtfully. She poked through her bowl with the spoon, as if she were looking for something. The dish was meatless, Aiden had noticed-- a pottage, made with broth from the bones of what he and Lambert had eaten, but containing no meat itself. The sort of cheap but nutritious thing you’d feed to an invalid, or have in the perpetual pot at an inn to sell cheap to travelers. “Lambert,” she said, “did you--”</p>
<p>“You put all kinds of stuff in this kitchen,” Lambert said, “and nothing<em> you’d </em>eat. I had to improvise.”</p>
<p>She gave him a long, almost stricken look, as if he’d said something cruel, and then looked down into her bowl again. Her body language was all wrong-- tired, sure, but meek and frightened like no mage would ever really look. She could control lightning with her hands, and Aiden remembered now that he’d heard her name as being among the opposition at Thanedd-- she’d served King Foltest in Temeria-- she’d probably killed kings herself, had undoubtedly been in the thick of all the recent-history shenanigans Aiden had been attempting futilely to catch up on. There was no reason a sorceress like that should be sitting here hunched and huddled like she was afraid of anything.</p>
<p>“So who’d you have to notify about the murder, then?” Aiden asked. “Am I in trouble for it?”</p>
<p>She shook her head, chewing and swallowing as she glanced at him. “No,” she said, “I told them I did it-- I probably should have gone to the local governor, but I opted to be dramatic about it and go straight to the top. I went to Nilfgaard, intending to throw myself on Cirilla’s mercy.”</p>
<p>Lambert sat up straighter, mildly offended. “I could’ve talked to Ciri,” he said.</p>
<p>“I know you could,” she said, “and I didn’t want to seem to be trading on that connection.”</p>
<p>“You don’t like to talk to government officials,” he pointed out.</p>
<p>“No,” she said, “but I have to, at some point. I thought I’d get it all out of the way at once, and find out if Nilfgaard meant it when they offered to pardon the Lodge of Sorceresses, or not.” She tossed her hair defiantly-- Aiden could see that it was really styled, and the illusion was to give it more panache than it had in real life, but she also had very much taken care to make it look nice in real life too. Possibly she’d anticipated other observers being able to see through illusions.</p>
<p>Stood to reason-- they had very good anti-sorcery measures in Nilfgaard, he’d heard.</p>
<p>“Well,” Lambert said. “How was Ciri?”</p>
<p>“Geralt was there,” Keira said. “I spoke to him first, and then he went and interceded on my behalf, which I hadn’t intended, but it was nice to see him. Did you know, when it’s really clean his hair is actually pure white? It always had dirt in it, every other time I’d seen him, so I’d just assumed it was gray, but it’s not, at all.”</p>
<p>Lambert laughed, at that. “He’s so filthy,” he said. “Shit, he’s<em> so</em> disgusting.”</p>
<p>“He was clearly feeling very sleek and smug,” she said. “I hadn’t expected to see him so at-ease in the Imperial Palace, but he was. Naturally, he was condescending and a bit of an ass, but it was worth it really.”</p>
<p>Aiden had met Geralt precisely once, and the man hadn’t known specifically who he was. He hadn’t remarked him as being notably disgusting in his personal habits, but then, as a Witcher, one did get used to a certain base level of grime when on the Path. One of his brothers in the Cat school had actually managed to sleep with Geralt once, out on the Path, and hadn’t commented either way on his hygiene.</p>
<p>But that confirmed-- “I still can’t believe it’s your brat that’s the Crown Princess now,” Aiden said. “I just-- you talked about her so much and she was such a little goblin.”</p>
<p>“That’s my baby,” Lambert said, with some satisfaction. “I hope she’s giving Emhyr hell.”</p>
<p>“She must be, for Geralt to look so smug,” the mage offered.</p>
<p>“Ha, yes,” Lambert said. Then his expression shifted. “Did he mention Eskel?”</p>
<p>The mage frowned thoughtfully. “No,” she said. “It didn’t come up. You’re worried about him, hm?”</p>
<p>“Not-- worried, per se,” Lambert said. “I just-- I don’t know where he wintered, is all.”</p>
<p>The mage gave him a long, considered look. “Do you have anything of his?” she asked.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Lambert said, and jumped to his feet, which unbalanced Aiden where he had his feet tucked into the crossbraces of the chair. Lambert laughed at him and yanked the chair away, then sat back down as Aiden untangled and re-settled himself. “Nothing here,” he said, “but back at the house, I have a bunch of his stuff.”</p>
<p>“Then we’ll find him, at some point,” the mage said. She sighed. “That, I could probably give you as a cantrip-- little locator spells for the, maybe, three or four people you care about most.” She sat back a little in the seat, and set aside the bowl. “I’d have to really think it over. Might have to use spelled objects. But I bet I could design something.”</p>
<p>Her expression had gone distant as she contemplated it, and Lambert looked interested, as if this wasn’t so far-fetched as to be basically nonsense.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Aiden said, “are you talking about teaching Lambert to cast spells?”</p>
<p>“Signs are a kind of cantrip,” the mage said, a bit abstractedly as if she were thinking of something else. “That’s how I was able to teach Lambert a new--” Her gaze sharpened. “Hey, did you have to have another <em>Cura</em> cast or did you find another solution for the headaches?”</p>
<p>“I didn’t go outside,” Aiden said. “It doesn’t hurt as much in dim light.” He paused. “<em>Cura</em>?”</p>
<p>“The Sign she taught me,” Lambert said. “Speaking of which, Keira, I can tell you have a headache, so give over.”</p>
<p>She frowned at him, but then sighed, and tilted her head up. “Fine,” she said.</p>
<p>Aiden frowned, and watched carefully as Lambert leaned forward and cast a Sign.</p>
<p>It wasn’t one Aiden was familiar with. It was what he’d done to fix Aiden’s headache, earlier. It was a roughly circular shape with the fingers, and Aiden could sense magic clearly enough to get a feeling that it was, in fact, just like casting any Sign. But his artificial eye gave him the additional insight that there was something giving off some kind of… magical emanation… from Lambert’s wrist.</p>
<p>The bracelet; he’d noticed Lambert wearing a bracelet, mostly metal with some leather holding it together. It was magical, somehow. Had something to do with this Sign.</p>
<p>The mage sighed, and let her head tip back in her seat. “Okay,” she said, “I didn’t realize how much my head hurt until it stopped.”</p>
<p>“You’re welcome,” Lambert said, with such fond sarcasm that Aiden could not believe he had not caught on before now that they were fucking.</p>
<p>She rolled her eyes at him, grinning, also horribly fond. Her illusions were still in place, but Aiden could make out the shape of her real face, the little lines around her mouth and eyes that made her a real person; she wasn’t just pretty and ageless, she was a handsome woman with a youthful but lived-in face, and her eyes were a warm brownish hazel and her chin was just a bit too strong for current fashions, but it gave her something of an edge to her grin. She looked like a person, not an immortal sorceress.</p>
<p>Fuck, either Lambert was in this consensually, or she was getting to <em>him</em> now too, Aiden thought. Mages could read minds, he knew that, so he narrowed his eyes and thought <em>Hey, fuck you</em>, as hard as he could.</p>
<p>She didn’t seem to notice; she only had eyes for Lambert, who had reached over and kicked the bottom of her chair leg. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you failing to empty that bowl,” he said. “I didn’t make that special for you and then put such a reasonable amount into that bowl for you <em>not</em> to eat it.”</p>
<p>“I ate a lot,” she protested. “I don’t have your metabolism, Lambert. Aretuza gave me tits, not a hollow leg.”</p>
<p>Aiden was distracted from his attempts to psychically insult her by attempting to parse that sentence. “Aretuza… gave you… tits,” he mused, and then screwed up his face and said, “What, like, as souvenirs?”</p>
<p>“Why do you think all sorceresses have more or less the same rack?” the mage asked, poking herself in the side of one breast to jostle it. It moved as though it were in a supportive undergarment of some kind instead of more or less suspended in midair behind an embroidered panel that only half-covered it. “There’s a fellow whose job it is to give us the Look at the end of our schooling, and he has very conventional tastes. I didn’t grow these <em>myself</em>, like some sort of <em>peasant</em>.”</p>
<p>Aiden realized he was staring at her breasts. “I,” he said. He had never considered this before, but come to think of it, most sorceresses <em>did</em> tend to have fairly similar body types. He blinked and tore his gaze away; they <em>were</em> really nice breasts. Halmatia had worn hers mostly-out like this but never quite so well-presented, and he’d never one time appreciated them aesthetically for any reason, so this was new territory for him.</p>
<p>“Oh,” she said, “you can look, it’s all right. If I have them out like that it’s because I <em>want</em> people to look at them. It’s not rude to stare.” She shimmied her shoulders and they jiggled, somewhat. His artificial eye showed him that she <em>was</em> wearing some sort of supportive garment, it was just invisible and made of magic.</p>
<p>“No, no,” Aiden said, “it’s fine, I like to think I was raised with better manners than that even if my education was somewhat unusual.”</p>
<p>“Well,” the mage said, and sat back a little in her chair, sighing wearily. “They were the most expensive part of this outfit.”</p>
<p>“Keira, I know how much you eat,” Lambert said. “I put how much I thought you’d eat in there, and you didn’t even manage half. After a day like that, and all the magic you used-- don’t think I can’t tell you don’t even have any reserves left in those beads.”</p>
<p>“How would you be able to tell that?” she asked, skeptical. “You know how many power objects I have back home. Even if I’d used up every one of these I’d’ve been able to refill them.”</p>
<p>“If you had spares,” Lambert said, “you’d’ve fixed your own headache.”</p>
<p>“I’d have to notice a headache to fix it,” she said. “As it happens, I have three of them left which is enough for me to use two on fixing this house’s wards and one last one to get back home.”</p>
<p>“You’re leaving again?” Lambert asked, apparently gobsmacked.</p>
<p>She blinked at him. “I have work to do,” she said. “In my workshop.”</p>
<p>“Surely that can wait until the morning, at least,” Lambert said, frowning.</p>
<p>“Someone’s got to feed the goat tonight,” she said. “It’s still snowy, it’s not like somebody else is going to come do it. You know how short a time it takes her to break out.”</p>
<p>Lambert looked at Aiden, and frowned, resolute. “We should just-- go there,” he said. “You don’t need to--”</p>
<p>“Aiden,” the mage said, with a sweet sad smile, “how do you feel about coming through a portal of my casting and staying in the house where I have my workshop and will likely be doing things all night that set off your medallion, miles away from anywhere else in the remote mountains of Kaedwen?”</p>
<p>“Nope,” Aiden said instantly, wracked by a little jolt of panic at the very thought of it.</p>
<p>The mage smiled a tiny little taut smile and spread her hands in a gesture toward Lambert that Aiden couldn’t help flinching away from. He’d been doing better, he thought, but-- <em>fuck</em>.</p>
<p>Lambert sighed, resigned. “Fair,” he said.</p>
<p>“I’ll be gone a couple of days, likely,” she said. “I made a way for you to get in touch. I can’t make the silent-communication thing work over that distance, not with what I have available at the moment, but I have this.” She shot Aiden an apologetic look, and then grimaced gingerly, gesturing near her own chest and then pulling something impossibly out of the inside of one of the amber beads at her throat. “If you break the token it will let me know you need me, so if anything pressing comes up-- I won’t be able to answer instantly, but I’ll be able to come within a short time.”</p>
<p>Lambert took the token between his fingers. It looked like a thin disk of wood, perforated in a few places with a design. “How many days?” he asked. “And where, Keira?”</p>
<p>“It’s more errands,” she said.</p>
<p>He tilted his head. “Did you see Philippa?” he asked.</p>
<p>She froze for an instant, and then said, “I did,” too casually.</p>
<p>“Philippa Eilheart?” Aiden asked, mildly incredulous.</p>
<p>“Ye-e-es,” she said, a bit hesitant. “I-- she’s the world’s expert on replacing eyes, Aiden, I can’t not consult with her on your case. And anyway I had to pass along what I discussed with Cirilla. I’m not wild about Philippa either but it’s not like I can exclude her from these sorts of arrangements. Not without making an enemy of her, which is really not what I need.”</p>
<p>“So long as you don’t owe her any favors,” Lambert said grudgingly.</p>
<p>The mage smiled tautly again. “Naturally,” she said. She sighed, and collected herself, looking around as if to put on her outer garments again, though she hadn’t shed any when she sat down. She wasn’t really dressed for the weather, but Aiden could identify now that the shimmer over her skin was a spell to shield her, to make her fairly skimpy outfit actually comfortable regardless of the ambient temperature.</p>
<p>She was, he couldn’t help thinking, a far, <em>far</em> more competent mage than Halmatia had been; while some of that could be that she was much older, it wasn’t hard to see that Halmatia had been singularly ill-studied. Which only pointed out that this mage was infinitely more dangerous.</p>
<p>Although, it also pointed out that someone who actually knew what she was doing was not nearly so inclined to be a thoughtless monster.</p>
<p>Hmm, that was a slippery rhetorical slope, and possibly an unwarranted assumption; Aiden squinted at the mage as he tried to decide whether she were attempting to influence his thoughts. <em>Get out of my head</em>, he thought grimly, and she blinked and turned to look at him. She’d heard that one.</p>
<p>She paused, looking sad, and said, “Aiden, I’m not. I’m going to cast a spell on the outside of the house, and it’s going to be facing outward, and it’s designed to keep anyone from coming in. But I’m not casting any spells on you, or on Lambert, or on anything inside this house.”</p>
<p>“I don’t want any spells,” he said, and his breath was coming too fast-- he’d learned decades ago, a century ago maybe, not to let panic rule him, but his adrenaline was coming on like-- ah<em> fuck</em>, he had to calm the fuck down. It was all right, he was shy of the danger zone here, but it was closer than it ought to be. Fuck, he was so fucking damaged by-- He paused, and focused on his breathing for a moment, forcing his lungs to obey him, pushing himself down the way he did to meditate.</p>
<p>She nodded calmly, looking down and away rather than pinning him with eye contact, and said, “I understand, but I’m afraid of other mages. You’re not recovered enough to fight them off, and Lambert has enough to do without keeping watch.”</p>
<p>“What other mages?” Lambert demanded, and then cut himself off. “Fuck. Philippa?”</p>
<p>“She wanted Halmatia’s notes,” the mage said quietly. “She was using her data.”</p>
<p>“Fuck,” Lambert said. He was looking uneasily at Aiden; he could hear his heartbeat, could probably smell his agitation. And if anyone knew the danger, it was Lambert.</p>
<p>“I don’t think she’ll come here,” the mage said. “I don’t think there’s any threat. But I want to know, immediately, if she does, or if <em>anyone</em> does. That’s what I want to do with these spells.”</p>
<p>Lambert was still looking at Aiden, and Aiden made himself look at him and steady out his breathing, calmer now, in control. Lambert was here, that was real, and even if this mage’s intentions were bad at least he had Lambert. That was somewhere to start.</p>
<p>“On the outside of the house,” Aiden said.</p>
<p>The mage nodded solemnly, meeting his eyes. “Nothing on you directly,” she said, “nothing inside the house.”</p>
<p>He was suddenly so tired. What did it matter? “Fine,” he said, letting himself slouch down in the seat. “Whatever.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Story earns its explicit rating here, see end notes for more detailed warnings about a single use of an antiquated and problematic sort-of slur if you're sensitive about that sort of thing.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They hadn’t done specifically <em>this</em> often, ever, in their intermittent twenty years together, and Lambert had been a little surprised to be asked, but now it made an astonishing kind of sense, as he watched Aiden gasping his way closer to what looked to be a pretty good slow-building orgasm with Lambert buried in him to the hilt and biting his lip against the hot tight overwhelming slickness of it. </p><p>“Fuck,” Aiden panted, semi-incoherent, “if I hadn’t known before I’d know now.”</p><p>“What?” Lambert said, because that had sounded like a sentence instead of the gibberish noises Aiden had been making for a little bit now.</p><p>“This,” Aiden said, “you’ve been-- fuck, yes, hold up, ah fuck,” and he had his head tipped back and was clearly riding right along the edge. “Ahh-- huh, you’ve been <em>practicing</em>.”</p><p>“Practicing <em>fucking</em>?” Lambert said, mildly incredulous. “Fucking, <em>twenty years</em> we-- I’m, fucking, a <em>hundred years old</em>, Aiden, I did not <em>need practice fucking</em>, what the fuck are you--”</p><p>“You’d always get too excited,” Aiden said, grinning so dreamily it was hard to muster more than a faint irritation. “Couldn’t ever make it-- ah fuck-- like<em> this</em>-- like-- ah-- fuck, Lambert, I’m--” His tone went high and pleading as his hips stuttered and he scrabbled at Lambert’s back with his fingers, trying to pull him in closer. “Fuck, fuck me--”</p><p>“If you want it you better take it,” Lambert told him unsympathetically, not altering his rhythm at all. “After a comment like that I’m not about to risk chasing it myself.”</p><p>It wasn’t quite a fair thing to say, as Aiden was in a position that gave him basically zero leverage and that was probably about half of what was working for him, here-- reassuringly, while he clearly had trauma about some things, at least <em>this</em> seemed fine-- but Aiden was a clever and resourceful sort with the kind of excellent body control Witchers tended to need to have, so he had little trouble managing to undulate his hips to get Lambert’s cock to work him over just how he needed at the moment, with little additional help from Lambert. </p><p>Aiden made some truly amazing sounds Lambert hadn’t ever guessed he’d be capable of, of the shrill and desperate kind of variety, which was in general far too hot to mock him for; he worked himself right up to and then over the edge and had the most spectacularly intense and prolonged orgasm Lambert had ever witnessed him having, and only then did he grab his own cock to guide himself through it. </p><p>“Well, now,” Lambert said, managing through sheer cussed annoyance not to alter his movement in any way at all, as if unmoved by this entire spectacle, “if you’d ever, I don’t know, made a request, or indicated to me in any way that this was what you were really after, you know?” </p><p>Aiden was too overwhelmed to make any sarcastic reply, still in the throes of bliss as it were, but Lambert could see he was trying to get himself together, and gave him a wicked little thrust that set him off on an aftershock and made him make some more fantastic gibbering little whimper noises. </p><p>“I mean,” Lambert said, “I know talking was never our strong suit, but that seems within the pretty clear basic request category. Anyway it takes me like five seconds to get going again if you ask, what the fuck do you mean I’d get too <em>excited</em>.”</p><p>“See-- I knew you’d-- take it like that,” Aiden panted, having to pause to gasp and whimper several times. Lambert had, grudgingly, backed off a little, but had only done so in intensity, not in rhythm, because he was pretending not to have been moved by the fantastic display he’d just participated in. <em>Really</em>, he’d had no <em>idea</em> Aiden could come like that, and he was honestly feeling a little disgruntled that he hadn’t known that. Twenty fucking years!</p><p>“Twenty fucking <em>years</em>, Aiden,” Lambert said. </p><p>“I mean it-- what we-- it was good-- and I figured-- ah fuck-- I figured it was good, baby,” Aiden said, still shivering, fuck, maybe he wasn’t done?-- “I wasn’t gonna-- but I fucking <em>died</em> and anyway-- oh fuck, ahh gods, you-- <em>hhhh</em>--”</p><p>“Shh, easy,” Lambert said, leaning down to kiss him gently, slowing his motion a little, “easy, darlin’, you’re all right.”</p><p>Aiden was gasping so hard he was sobbing for breath, his whole body nearly in spasms around Lambert’s cock, and Lambert couldn’t tell if he were overstimulated or getting close again already or still going or what. He sounded almost distressed but he smelled fantastic, no hint of anything like distress at all, and Lambert figured as long as they weren’t planning on going anywhere by horseback tomorrow this was probably fine. Even then-- they were Witchers, he’d survived his share of inadvisable intersections of athletic sex and strenuous horseback travel. Possibly, more than his share, if Aiden had been holding out on this. </p><p>Aiden thrashed and mewled and hung onto Lambert’s hips with bruising force and in a moment he was unmistakably coming again, clenching down hard enough to pretty much hold off Lambert’s own incipient orgasm until it backed off on its own, possibly sensing a superior antagonist here, which was a messy metaphor at best but Lambert tipped his head down against Aiden’s neck and laughed at himself, at them, at the whole thing.</p><p>“You glorious little catamite, I had no idea,” he said. </p><p>Aiden whimpered, hanging on as his body wrung its way through an aftershock or continuation or whatever the fuck was going on. He was crying now, but it absolutely didn’t smell like distress. “Holy shit,” Lambert said, really not having been prepared to sort of midwife this kind of whatever this was into existence. </p><p>It was hard to get mad at someone for saying you’d been bad in bed before when at the moment that same person was making you feel kind of like a sex god, though Lambert couldn’t help but think that his part in this could just as easily have been played by an inanimate object. Well, he’d been doing more in the beginning but by now he was just sort of along for the ride. </p><p>It <em>was</em> impossible to witness something like this unmoved, however, and now Lambert was biting his tongue and realizing he was pretty gods-damned close, himself, and he couldn’t exactly ask Aiden how much longer he needed this to go on-- well, he could try.</p><p>“Buddy,” he said, and it came out sort of strangled, “I’m kind of-- I can’t--<em> fuck</em>--”</p><p>“Yes,” Aiden said, a miracle of coherence, “please-- Lambert--”</p><p>“I just-- I don’t want to-- before you’re ready, Princess,” okay, he might be a bit far gone for sarcasm, but he was nothing if not willing to die trying when it came to that sort of shit.</p><p>“Fuck you,” Aiden managed, and Lambert couldn’t answer him because he was coming too hard to talk. </p><p>Lambert was currently in excellent condition, well-fed and well-rested after the unexpected afternoon semi-nap (which he’d spent mostly petting Aiden’s hair and not really thinking about anything but not actually meditating either), and so he managed not to entirely collapse on Aiden, until he decided it would be funnier if he did, so he did, and Aiden grumbled at him but was also sort of still crying so it wasn’t a particularly intimidating sound. </p><p>In a moment, though, Aiden had his revenge, because he got enough control of his limbs back to entirely wrap Lambert up in them and pull him into an extremely thorough cuddle. “I have you now,” Aiden grumbled, his voice thick.</p><p>“Shit,” Lambert said, but did not resist. Possibly in their previous life he’d’ve punched Aiden in the solar plexus, since that didn’t take a lot of leverage to make effective, but Aiden had been fucking <em>dead</em> for three years so Lambert wasn’t about to look a gift snuggle in the… that metaphor wasn’t really working out for him either, he was having a bad run with that sort of thing just now.</p><p>Aiden’s breathing had mostly returned to normal. “Ugh,” he said, after a moment, “you’re so fucking <em>sticky</em>.”</p><p>“You directly requested that,” Lambert pointed out. “Or. I mean. Okay, I’m not sure what you meant but it <em>sounded</em> like a direct request.”</p><p>Aiden grumbled, but didn’t let go of him or ease up at all. Lambert listened to Aiden’s heartbeat, its familiar slow rhythm, and let himself marvel at it. Aiden had been dead, for three fucking years, only he hadn’t, at all. It was a lot to take in, and Lambert had mostly caught up, but sort of hadn’t, really. </p><p>“I don’t mean that you weren’t good in bed,” Aiden said, finally. “I just meant-- we never had enough time together to do-- what we just did-- because we’d never get to it, because the first time was always kind of a writeoff because we’d both be way too excited about it, and--” He stopped.</p><p>“Hey, fuck you,” Lambert said, without rancor.</p><p>“I mean,” Aiden said, and Lambert dug his knuckle into that solar plexus just a little, as a reminder that he <em>could</em>. Undeterred, Aiden wriggled a bit, which was-- okay it was pretty sticky, in general, in this bed. “Well,” Aiden went on, “I always wished you’d fuck other people not really because of that, that wasn’t really what it was-- I worried that if I was all you had you’d get real fucked-up if--” His voice went thready and petered out, and he was quiet a moment before clearing his throat and saying, “If something happened to me.”</p><p>“Guess I lived,” Lambert said lightly, but well, it didn’t come out lightly. </p><p>Aiden’s arms went even tighter, which Lambert hadn’t thought could happen, so he made a squeaking noise. “Fuck,” Aiden said, voice going from thin to thick again. “I didn’t-- I don’t mean it like you can’t take care of yourself, Lambert, but-- I mean, <em>I</em> don’t have a whole lot else in <em>my</em> life either and you were the only thing I--” </p><p>Lambert had lost most of his school in a pogrom fifty-some-- shit, <em>sixty</em>-some?--  years before. The Cats had gone through many upheavals, but the most recent loss had been the traveling school, which had been wiped out only about a decade ago. He’d been around for that-- hadn’t seen Aiden for almost a year, and then had spent a winter and most of the spring with him, after that. He knew it had hit him hard and there’d been complicated shit surrounding it, but he hadn’t really-- well, he’d thought about it plenty. Mostly he didn’t need the reminder, but here was one.</p><p>“Baby,” he said, and kissed Aiden’s collarbone, which was what he could reach.</p><p>After another few moments Aiden got himself a little bit together, and wiped his face on the sheet, which was sticky enough in general that probably Lambert was going to have to get up and go find spares and figure out laundry in this joint, so a little snot didn’t really matter. He kissed Lambert’s hair. “So, I mean,” Aiden said, fumbling a bit, “it’s-- she’s an incredibly dangerous person, Lambert, and I don’t-- know if you really--”</p><p>“I know <em>precisely</em> how dangerous she is,” Lambert said patiently. He had enough of an afterglow that he wasn’t going to bother wrecking it by getting defensive.</p><p>“Anyway,” Aiden persisted, “if you’re gonna tell me that you’re fucking her because you really do feel that way and not because she’s making you feel it--”</p><p>“I really do,” Lambert said. “Gods, Aiden, you really think somebody could get me to do something I didn’t want to without me being a sarcastic asshole the entire way? I’m a sarcastic asshole even when I <em>do</em> want to.”</p><p>“This is true,” Aiden mused. But then he followed it up with, “Well, so she feels the same way back?”</p><p>Oh. That was-- Lambert realized he’d kind of flinched. He let his breath out in a sigh and said, “I dunno.” But that was dishonesty by omission, so he sighed again, and mumbled, grudgingly, “No.”</p><p>Aiden appeared to be thinking that over. “What makes you say that?” he said.</p><p>“She<em> said</em> that,” Lambert said. “She said, we’re not, like, soulmates.” It was hard to fidget when enfolded in a prison of extremely long limbs, but Lambert was resourceful. “Witchers and mages, neither of us get to have stupid love stories anyway.”</p><p>“You and I do,” Aiden pointed out. “I was dead! And you rescued me. That’s fuckin’ <em>romantic</em>, buddy.”</p><p>“<em>She</em> rescued you,” Lambert argued. “She did literally all of it. She had to, fucking,<em> tie me up</em> before she told me you were alive because she knew I’d just fuck it up, and then she had to be in charge of the whole thing, and then all I did was completely fail to kill a golem while she did all the work of actually getting you free. She had to pretend to be nice to that monster, and she did it, and then she gave me directions to this safe house she’d set up because she’d already thought about how you weren’t gonna want to go through a portal, and then she’d stocked the fucking pantry and made sure there was a pretty apron for me to wear, and, <em>fuck</em>,” he had to stop because he was too emotional about it.</p><p>Aiden loosened his grip only enough to stroke Lambert’s back soothingly, though Lambert had heard him whisper <em>tie you up</em> to himself, and then said, “Well, so what makes you say she doesn’t feel like that about you?”</p><p>“She <em>said</em>,” Lambert said, and then paused. Shit, now that he listed that all out, those were not the actions of a person who did not care and was just looking to pleasantly pass some time.</p><p>“For someone who’s terrible at using his words,” Aiden said, but Lambert interrupted, indignant.</p><p>“I <em>did</em> use my words!” he protested. “I-- for fucking<em> once</em>, I<em> used words</em>, and I <em>told</em> her, and she just got all quiet and weird and--”</p><p>“Shh,” Aiden said, with a gentle laugh that Lambert had to grudgingly admit was probably sympathetic. “Fuck, okay, I can’t handle how sticky this is. I gotta go clean up.”</p><p>This house was far more normally-equipped with a kettle and several buckets, instead of the bizarre portal-accessed alternate-reality luxury bath cave-grove Lambert was astonished to find out he’d grown so used to as to consider largely prosaic. But they got themselves clean, and discovered there were spare sheets and really only the one sheet was too damp to use. The lateness of the hour meant it was nearly dawn by the time they were finished cleaning up, however, so Lambert declined to get back into bed and went back to the kitchen to work on something nice for breakfast.</p><p>Aiden leaned in the door, giving the flower-embroidered apron a keen once-over. “She bought you that?”</p><p>“Was in the box with the kitchen linens,” Lambert said, “but it was folded separately. She has to have bought it on purpose.”</p><p>Aiden considered that. “So she knows your whole,” and he waved a hand. “Deal. I mean, not that you’re shy about telling people.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Lambert said. </p><p>Aiden pushed off the door frame and came and put his arms around Lambert from behind. “Baby, don’t look like that,” he said, “I didn’t mean you <em>should</em> be shy. It was just an observation.”</p><p>“Fuck you,” Lambert said, making absolutely no effort to dislodge him, yet. He wanted to say something about Keira not being a woman but then he thought maybe it wasn’t up to him to say that. He didn’t think she’d ever breathed a syllable of it to anyone else. It was different than how he felt, demonstrably. </p><p>“You worn those shoes for her yet?” Aiden asked, voice gone a bit lower, which was a dirty trick because he <em>knew</em> how that worked on Lambert even though it shouldn’t. Lambert shivered. </p><p>“No,” he said, twitching away from Aiden’s mouth, which was quite close to the back of his neck. “Those are-- <em>you</em> bought those.”</p><p>“I can share,” Aiden said, his breath hot against the back of Lambert’s neck, right at the edge of his hair. He shivered again. “There’s enough to go around. They won’t get worn out.”</p><p>Logically, Lambert knew that Aiden was proposing to take turns, not to have a threesome, but his imagination picked up on the thought of both of them at once and went off running, hampered not one bit by the high heels that in real life Lambert could fuck in but not much else. (He <em>could</em> walk in them, but had never really tried very hard at it, normally being busy with other things.) “Fuck,” he said, and his circulatory system was too good for him to be dizzy about it, but-- “You can’t stand to be in the same room as her, though.”</p><p>“I mean, I don’t need to be there,” Aiden said, and then sighed, which made Lambert shiver again. “Baby, you just gotta give me some time. I know you want all your friends to be friends and I’m not opposed, I just-- she’s fucking terrifying, Lambert, and I don’t have the guts to find that sexy just now.”</p><p>“No, no, I get it,” Lambert said, a little weakly, because part of his mind was still busy running wild-- he wasn’t even imagining anything <em>concrete</em> but just the <em>idea</em> of being-- <em>completed</em>, like that-- it was a lot. </p><p>Aiden sighed deeply, and then bit down viciously on the side of Lambert’s neck and that was that for the cooking, for the moment. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Oh, one mild warning, Lambert uses a very antiquated sort of homophobic sort of... is it a slur? not sure what to call it-- anyway he's gently mocking Aiden with extremely loving sarcasm about being the receiving partner during anal sex, using the word <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamite">catamite</a>-- link to definition includes historic pedophilic content but Lambert's not using it in that sense.<br/>Listen I initially had him saying "power bottom" and I liked that better, it's more affirming, but it's also extremely 20thC and I know the Continent is not a historical setting but it mostly didn't make sense. This gets the sense across and also isn't wildly modern.</p><p> </p><p>[i'm really proud of my use of "buddy" in a sex scene here, someone please clap, LOL]</p><p>yeah this is another short chapter. listen the world is on fucking fire and I can't organize a consistent chapter-length to save myself so we're going to abandon that notion right along with chapter titles. 2021 baby! (you know what it means, it means the next chunk is mega-long and complicated, so you've got that to look forward to.)</p><p>[if i were using chapter titles idk if i'd've been able to resist calling this one "life is hard and so am I" which, shoutout to the time I had mono in 1998 and listened to the Eels on repeat over that awful winter break where I thought I was gonna get expelled from school for being queer and can't stand that song anymore, that's super not the vibe I'm going for here but it is another notable time when life was a trash fire! Also, arguably the world in general is worse-off but now I have the coping strategy of publishing porn about it so let's all take a moment to enjoy that.]</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is a long chapter. Y'all wanted them to just talk it out, right? *innocent grin*</p>
<p>warning: emetophobia, see end note for more concrete details</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“-- but someone is trafficking in magical creatures regardless of whether they’re sentient or not,” Keira said, frustrated. “It’s dangerous, it’s immoral, it’s harmful, it’s a terrible idea--”</p>
<p>“You <em>do</em> get worked up over things,” Philippa said, amused.</p>
<p>“Well,” Triss said diplomatically, “it is worth getting worked up over. That could be a serious problem.”</p>
<p>Keira gestured in relief, and Philippa rolled her eyes. “Of all the problems we face,” she said. </p>
<p>“We can discuss more than one thing,” Margarita put in tartly. “After all, we’re ostensibly smart people.”</p>
<p>Cirilla hadn’t said much of anything. They were all conferenced-in by megascope, using some networking protocol that Cirilla had seen that they all managed to implement, and they’d been talking for over an hour now and nobody had yet threatened to kill Keira so she was taking it as a good experience overall. </p>
<p>Keira had caught on that Cirilla and Yennefer kept trading significant glances, though. It stood to reason the two of them would be close; during the Lodge’s years-ago ill-advised attempts to meddle in Cirilla’s life,  the girl had insisted on Yennefer’s status as being near to that of a mother, and Keira had seen enough of their interactions back at Kaer Morhen to confirm that they still had some remnants of that dynamic intact. </p>
<p>“I am not saying we need to solve the problem now,” Keira said, “nor am I even implying that it’s something <em>we</em> need to solve at all, I just think it’s crucial that we recognize that this sort of thing is happening and be prepared to intervene where we have the chance. I know it’s a stupid cliché to say that people with power have also responsibility, but it’s important to remember it if we don’t want people always taking our power as an excuse to burn us at the fucking stake, excuse my language.”</p>
<p>“Yes, yes,” Philippa said boredly, “you’ve said.”</p>
<p>“Noted,” Cirilla put in. “As it <em>is</em>, nominally, <em>my</em> responsibility, I appreciate the report and encourage anyone else who encounters anything of the sort to also bring it to my attention as directly as possible.”</p>
<p>Everyone acknowledged that, and Keira noted from the way Cirilla kept glancing slightly to one side of herself that there was likely a scribe there, taking notes on the meeting. Sensible. This was all very sensible and a great deal less theatrical than any of the meetings of any of the previous self-directed governing bodies of mages. </p>
<p>She wasn’t a fan of the Nilfgaardian regime, and would never forgive them for much of what had transpired in the last series of wars, but she was rather fond of Cirilla and moreover believed her competent, which went a long way toward sweetening the situation. </p>
<p>“Ah,” Cirilla said, “I am afraid the time I have for this meeting is nearly at an end. Was that the last matter to be discussed? We can reconvene in the near future, and I will send messages to organize the next conclave.” She paused, and waited, but no one protested. “Very well. I thank you all for your cooperation and look forward to improving matters as we go on. I’ll be in contact with each of you in the next few days.”</p>
<p>They all made their farewells and signed off. Keira sat down shakily with a sigh; she was exhausted, hadn’t slept well again, and had spent the day alternately chasing down rumors and doing sensitive fiddly bits of prep-work for elaborate spells she was going to have to construct, mostly to placate Philippa. She was also doing tests to ascertain whether the information the sorceress had given her about eye replacements was actually relevant or if it was junk data to distract her long enough to get whatever it was that Philippa was really after. </p>
<p>So far, however, it did seem to be relevant. But it meant that Keira was burning through all the chaos she could naturally generate in a day, as well as a large store of her reserves in power objects and passive chaos-collection devices, and combined with her inability to sleep or eat much, it did not bode well for her continued well-being. And she kept having intermittent chest pains. She really needed to ask Triss about that. It was probably because she wasn’t eating, because she couldn’t get her stomach to settle enough, because she wasn’t sleeping, because of the night terrors-- at any rate, she was busy and it was all going to either sort itself out or kill her and she was tired enough not to really care either way.</p>
<p>And, pathetically, she missed Lambert, which was fucking stupid, and she was wasting energy both feeling it and also on being annoyed with herself about it. Gods, he was <em>fine</em>, he and Aiden were probably fucking <em>right now</em>, they were obviously doing well together and at least she’d managed to save Aiden intact enough that his natural (if anything about a Witcher could be called natural, really) resilience would probably get him back to normal in no time and she would take a moment to be pleased with herself for that if she <em>had</em> a fucking moment, which she didn’t, and <em>fuck</em> why did her chest hurt <em>so fucking much</em> when she thought about them? She let herself groan out loud and clutch at her weirdly-aching chest, but it didn’t help and she just felt stupid.</p>
<p>The megascope chimed: Philippa. Fantastic. She composed herself, and answered it.</p>
<p>“You’re really running yourself ragged caring about every little thing that happens,” Philppa said without preamble.</p>
<p>“There’s rather a lot going on,” Keira said. “And I feel that what we do now sets important precedents for how we go on.”</p>
<p>“You just spent so long hiding,” Philippa said. “I’m surprised you’re diving back into it all with such gusto, now.”</p>
<p>“If I’m in, I’m in,” Keira said. “Once I broke the flimsy pretense of privacy, there was no point holding any of it back any longer.”</p>
<p>“Seems like odd timing,” Philippa said. “The thaws haven’t hit the north country yet, it’s not quite campaign season. We used to do much of our politicking in the winter, when the non-magic-users were at a disadvantage, but the season’s almost over.”</p>
<p>Keira shrugged. “It wasn’t timed,” she said. “I acted as soon as I had information. I wasn’t waiting for anything in particular. But that’s what magic gets us, we don’t have to concern ourselves with the timing or the seasons, particularly, except for noting which planets are in influence and such if it’s relevant to the flow of chaos and whatnot. But for politics,” she shook her head and shrugged. “When one can act one might as well.”</p>
<p>“Hmm,” Philippa said. “Well, at any rate, I was wondering if you’d had time to read my notes, or if you’re saving them for a quieter time.”</p>
<p>“I did,” Keira said. “I read them through all the way, and I set up some of the more time-intensive preparations I noticed would be needed. But I wanted to ask--”</p>
<p>“You need to start with the stones,” Philippa said. “The stones have to be in your presence for-- or, I suppose, the subject-- is it a he? He has to carry them around for some time, first. That’s the part that takes the longest. That’s why my earliest attempts failed. I only figured it out because-- well, I <em>had</em> to carry my spares for so long, since I was more or less on the run, and the ones I’d carried with me a long time, those were the ones that succeeded.”</p>
<p>“Ah,” Keira said. “You did mention-- something of that, but I hadn’t really--”</p>
<p>“It’s easy to overlook,” Philippa said. “That’s why I thought I’d make sure you saw it. You can’t really begin anything else until he’s had them for a-- well, I carried them in a pouch I kept down the front of my bodice, I don’t know <em>where</em> to recommend he keep them. I’m not entirely certain how close they need to be, but I know if I used stones I’d kept in a drawer they were no good.”</p>
<p>Keira laughed at Philippa’s moue of distaste over where a man would keep a tiny bag intimately on his person. It was times like this when one could entirely forget what a snake Philippa was; she was a good collaborator, a competent magic-worker, a thoughtful friend at times, and then when it suited her she would betray you to your death without ever regretting it for a moment. “I may have to leave it to his discretion,” she said, “but if I discover anything more specific about the process, I’ll be sure to tell you. I assume you’ll want to publish this as a monograph at some point.”</p>
<p>“I’ve never had much use for academic acclaim,” Philippa said wryly. “And honestly this process is so time-consuming, I can’t see it being the sort of thing that’ll be widely-applicable. If you aren’t yourself a mage, or fairly intimate with one, you’re not going to be able to afford or coordinate the amount of spellcasting and potion work that’s got to go into this, no matter how badly you want or need eyes.” She shrugged. “Moreover I don’t think it works on people born blind. I think it only would work to replace an eye lost to physical damage-- I don’t even think it could restore sight to someone blinded by fever, for example.”</p>
<p>“It is of limited utility in that respect,” Keira allowed. “Still, it could be a foundation for other areas of study.”</p>
<p>“Fair,” Philippa said. “Now. Here’s the thing: he’s a Witcher, no?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Keira admitted. She knew exactly what Philippa was going to ask, and had no way to avoid it. She needed collaboration on this, at least for the initial stages; she wouldn’t be able to recreate Philippa’s work and also take into consideration the different physiology of a Witcher as the subject, without learning more about Witchers, and then she would necessarily have to share that information with Philippa, which she very much did not want to do. </p>
<p>“So he’s going to react differently to a lot of this, and it may well be that a great deal of my work is useless here.” That was more frank than Keira had expected Philippa to be. “I know just enough about them to know that I don’t know enough. Is it that you owe this one a favor, or something? Is he making you do this?”</p>
<p>“No,” Keira said, “it’s-- well, yes, I owe him a favor, but no, he’s not making me do this.” That wasn’t right, either. “I mean, we’ve owed one another favors-- I’ve lost track, honestly. But-- sometimes you just see a fine thing damaged and wish to repair it, that’s a large part of it.”</p>
<p>“Hm,” Philippa said. “So the one missing an eye-- is that one of the ones that raised Cirilla?”</p>
<p>Keira considered it. “I don’t know which of them were involved directly,” she said, “but certainly, he’s among the group in some way. I don’t know that it matters.” She understood Philippa’s question, now. “Certainly, Cirilla would be pleased with me for helping him, and would likewise be pleased that you had contributed, but it’s not going to make her put either of us in charge of anything she wouldn’t otherwise give us charge of.”</p>
<p>“Hm,” Philippa said, eyebrows raised nonchalantly as she contemplated that. </p>
<p>“In the meantime,” Keira said, a bit hastily, “I’ve nearly completed the analysis of Halmatia’s notes and I have a reaction going of the--”</p>
<p>Her megascope chimed. She frowned at it. </p>
<p>“What?” Philippa asked.</p>
<p>“Someone else is trying to contact me,” she said. “I can’t tell who it is.”</p>
<p>“We can catch up later,” Philippa said. “I’ve got another batch of notes to send over to you later, but get started with those stones.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll let you sort out where to put them.”</p>
<p>Keira laughed, and disconnected to take the other incoming contact request. </p>
<p>“-- aware,” Cirilla was saying, with exaggerated patience.</p>
<p>“Oh,” Keira said. “It’s-- your Highness.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Cirilla said, turning back to her. “I’m glad you’re still there, I wanted to ask you how Aiden is doing.”</p>
<p>“Oh,” Keira said. “He’s doing astonishingly well, all things considered. I’ve-- I’m only going by there for short periods, he’s a little-- well, I wanted to give him some space, you know? He’s got reason to be shy of mages, and all.”</p>
<p>Cirilla grinned, clasping her hands at her chest; her posture looked relieved. “I’m so glad,” she said. “I’ve been worried.”</p>
<p>“Did you know him well?” Keira asked, before she could think better of it.</p>
<p>Cirilla shook her head. “Not-- directly,” she said, “I never actually met him. But Lambert talked about him a lot, and it-- well, he was part of the whole.” She gestured vaguely. “You know. Ambiance. The setting. The scene. He would send things home with Lambert for me, that sort of thing.”</p>
<p>“That sounds quite sweet,” Keira said, surprised to once again feel jealous.</p>
<p>“It was one of the happiest times of my life,” Cirilla said, “and he was a part of it, even indirectly. It was-- I want quite badly to meet him but I also don’t want to butt in before he’s ready to receive visitors.”</p>
<p>“Oh, because you never got to,” Keira said. She nodded understanding. “He does seem to be a lovely person, very quick-witted. He and Lambert are very funny together, I think. I was going to check in on them again in a day or two, and I can ask them then if they’re up for a visit.”</p>
<p>“Oh, marvelous,” Cirilla said. </p>
<p>“I should-- something I’m working on,” Keira said, “is that he lost an eye, in the assassination attempt, and he’s got-- do you remember Vilgefortz and his gemstone-based ocular replacement?”</p>
<p>“I do,” Cirilla said, a bit darkly.</p>
<p>“He’s got one of those and it’s fairly awful, so I’m trying to work with Philippa on making him a better replacement,” Keira explained. “But it’s-- well, it’s going to be tricky, since he’s so justifiably shy of mages. Perhaps I could loop you in on the project, he might be more comfortable with you?”</p>
<p>“Oh,” Cirilla said, interested, but her face fell. “Keira, I know very little of healing magic, and you know as well as anyone that my basic spellcrafting isn’t exactly up to--” She cut herself off. “I’m not practiced, not at that sort of thing. I wouldn’t want to risk anything important.”</p>
<p>“I’m not commenting on that either way,” Keira said. “I wouldn’t ask you to be in sole charge of anything you weren’t perfectly fluent in. I was just suggesting, even if I were right there constructing the spells, if you were the one who actually cast them he might be more comfortable. It was just an idea; I haven’t even really broached it with him.”</p>
<p>“Ah,” Cirilla said. “Well-- I mean-- it’s not a terrible idea, I just-- I do not have time to take on learning an entirely new practice of spellcrafting, you know? And my particular… talents may not truly lie that way at all.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I wouldn’t--” Keira said, and paused, as something in her necklace let out a distinct little pulse. That was a spell alert. What was she supposed to remember? “Oh, pardon me, I--” What was it? She felt at it-- no, the one to remind her to check the reactions on the spells she was running for Philippa was still thrumming silently away, that wasn’t done yet. It was--</p>
<p>Oh, it was the token she’d given Lambert, to summon her if he needed her. </p>
<p>Cirilla’s gaze had gone somewhere out of the field of Keira’s view, and she frowned. “Sorry,” Keira said, “I just had a notification--”</p>
<p>“I’ve got to cut this short as well,” Cirilla said, a touch heavily. “I’ll be in touch with you?”</p>
<p>“I’ll let you know about a visit. Ah, tomorrow, probably? I might send a message via the relay, if that’s all right,” Keira said.</p>
<p>Cirilla nodded solemnly, and cut the connection. Keira sat down heavily, exhausted, and then flopped over backward on the ruined sofa’s split cushion for a moment. She was conducting these megascope meetings from the ruined turret of a deserted castle, in case anyone tried to track down where she physically was, because she badly did not want to give away her safehouse location. This was fine but meant she’d have to portal back to the Kaedwen safehouse, and then from there portal to the safehouse where Lambert was, and she was so tired, so very very tired, and she could just feel the beginnings of a migraine pressing in and she ought to quit while she was ahead and go lie down for a little while. </p>
<p>But. She’d told Lambert she would come. </p>
<p>And what if something had happened and he really needed her? </p>
<p>Fuck. She sat up, gathered up her things, and portaled to the Kaedwen safehouse. There, she hurried through checking on the spell reactions, gathering up the collection of proto-eye agate stones she’d assembled, running out to make sure the fucking goat wasn’t too bored and had some hay and some water and the horses’ water hadn’t frozen, but it had, and she had to haul more water for them because they were thirsty, and that took her a few minutes because her migraine was really starting to set in and she absolutely could not spare the chaos and so had to actually physically haul the water with her actual arms, which was a real drag. </p>
<p>She made it back into the house and stood for just a moment, breathing deeply to try to focus through her deep weariness. It was fine. She was fine. This was fine. </p>
<p>She was so tired that casting the portal hurt this time, and she stumbled through it and threw up and had to sit there in the woods, composing herself. Lambert would smell it, she knew, so she dug around in her bag and found a tisane Triss had brewed for her, and sat slowly drinking it for a few moments. This one was supposed to help with headaches and nausea, which was good, because she had both. Oh, this was going to settle in to be a real migraine, and she was in some trouble, here. </p>
<p>Half of the bottle, and a few minutes of deep breathing, and she pulled herself together and walked the little distance to the safehouse, expecting Lambert to be leaning on the fence waiting for her.</p>
<p>But he wasn’t. </p>
<p>Faint smoke from the chimney; someone was home, the fire wasn’t banked. One of the horses was in the turnout pen, watching her with some interest, but the other wasn’t there, or perhaps was in the barn or sleeping behind the hillock or something. Nothing outwardly seemed to be wrong. </p>
<p>No one was at the door. No one was at the window. She pushed her way through the little garden gate with a rising sense of trepidation, and groped absently for enough chaos to cast a defensive spell. </p>
<p>She had to really scrape for it. She held it, un-cast but built, ready like a Sign, because she just couldn’t afford to cast it unless she really needed it. As it was she didn’t have enough chaos to open a portal, which was possibly a problem. Had he called her because they were under attack, or had to flee, or-- she’d taken too long, she’d let him down--</p>
<p>She got herself under control and went to the door of the house and hesitated. Knock, or barge in in case there was something hostile? She set her teeth, and decided on knocking.</p>
<p>“Lambert?” she called softly. “Are you there?”</p>
<p>The door opened, and it was Aiden standing there, and he was taller than she’d remembered, somehow, and she concealed her startlement poorly. “Oh,” she said. “Ha. Hi. Aiden.”</p>
<p>“Wondered how long it was going to take you,” he said mildly, standing back. She came in.</p>
<p>“Sorry, I was in the middle of some things,” she said, and went to dump the things she’d brought on the table. “I hadn’t expected to hear from you today. I was going to pick up a few more things before my next visit.” Hmm, the tisane had settled her stomach somewhat but hadn’t done a damned thing about the headache. She let her eyes go unfocused for a moment, then rubbed her face and turned around to smile brightly at Aiden. “But that’s all right. What’s…” And it was then that she realized Lambert was not in the room. “Er,” she said. “Where’s Lambert?”</p>
<p>“He went into town,” Aiden said, pushing the door closed and taking a couple of steps into the room. “He wanted to move around, wanted to pick up some more clothes. I told him I wanted to find out how bad it was to be on my own.” He shrugged. “Turns out that was a bit of a premature experiment, so I decided it was time to have a little bit of a talk with you, since I more or less haven’t done that, yet.”</p>
<p>He’d lured her out here to kill her, she thought, and felt herself freeze like a rabbit. In her current state, he wouldn’t have much trouble. <em>Oh Gods. Don’t show fear</em>. You never showed fear. She forced herself to smile. “Ha,” she said, “there’s not much to talk about, though, is there?”</p>
<p><em>He thinks you have Lambert imprisoned the way Halmatia had him,</em> she thought<em>. He has decided this is the only way to free Lambert. Oh, sweet Melitele, even if you run you can’t escape him, and you don’t have the strength to make a portal right this moment and you stupid</em> bitch<em>, you forgot to refill your power objects, and you are </em>fucked<em>.</em></p>
<p>It took a supreme effort of will to show none of this on her face, and it was probably all moot because he could hear her heartbeat and likely smell the cold sweat that had broken out all down her back. She still had her defensive spell built but uncast in one hand but that was it, that was all she had, and it would maybe buy her a minute, whether he stopped to get his sword or not. </p>
<p>He was just standing there, though, most of his weight on one foot, one arm behind his back with the hand looped around the other elbow the way only a very long-limbed and skinny person could comfortably stand in idleness. He wasn’t in armor or anything, didn’t have his swords on, just had one of Lambert’s spare shirts with flowery embroidery around the neck on up top and the overly-ornate leather trousers Halmatia had kept him in on the bottom, and he just looked like a man, slightly-disinterested and easygoing, with his nice handsome jaw and unconcerned aspect. </p>
<p>He shrugged. “I mean,” he said, “you saved me, and Lambert made a point of telling me he’d been useless through the whole thing and all the credit belongs to you.”</p>
<p>A distant bit of Keira’s mind noted that somehow, a shirt that looked distinctly feminine on Lambert managed to look masculine on Aiden; he looked blithely beautiful and ornamented but no less manly, and she hadn’t really contemplated how that would work but it did. It wasn’t like he was more masculine in build than Lambert; Lambert was compact and muscled, and Aiden was rawboned and lanky, and he had the too-short sleeves rolled up to show sinewy forearms and bony wrists. </p>
<p>“I see,” she said, and her attempt at a graceful laugh came out awkward and nervous. “Well, I mean. You’re welcome? I couldn’t-- I’ve reported to the Crown Princess, you weren’t the only sentient she had in that horrible basement, and-- it was terrible.”</p>
<p>“I knew she had other critters in there,” Aiden said. “I thought I got a whiff of a succubus, or something, and definitely a sylvan?”</p>
<p>“Incubus,” Keira said. “He was in a bad way but I think I got him safely back to his folk. And you’re right, there was a sylvan-- he wasn’t really coherent, but I sent him home too, I think. I hope.”</p>
<p>Aiden shook his head slightly, disgusted, looking away. “She was a monster,” Keira said, half-whispering it with a shudder. </p>
<p>“She was,” he agreed. He took a deep breath. “Well, so-- anyway, thank you.”</p>
<p>She smiled politely. “That’s not all you wanted to talk to me about, though,” she prompted, carefully. </p>
<p>“Well, no,” he said, “of course not.” He gave her a surprisingly winning grin, a little rakish and almost flirty. Oh, he was <em>definitely</em> going to kill her. She smiled back. </p>
<p>“Oh?” She bit her lip, raising her eyebrows flirtatiously, and swallowed down her terror. “What’s this about, then?”</p>
<p>His eyes narrowed, his eyebrows drawing down a little. “Here’s the thing,” he said, face screwed up in confusion, “I’m used to people being afraid of me, but I have watched you make lightning with your hands, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what’s got you so terrified right now.” He took a half-step back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Did you run the whole way here? What’s going on?”</p>
<p>“Nothing,” she said brightly. “It’s fine.” Fuck, and now he’d be angry-- it was a funny thing, how if you were afraid of a man it was your problem, and if he noticed that you were afraid of him it was your problem, and sometimes he’d get so angry that you dared think he’d hurt you that he’d hurt you for it. </p>
<p>Oh, Keira had been a mage for a long time, had certainly had power a long time, but it hadn’t been her <em>entire</em> life, and even as a mage, she didn’t always have access to enough power to make it not her problem. </p>
<p>If she just turned and ran-- well, then the jig was up, if you show fear they always pounce on it, if you run they pursue, and this man had nearly a foot of height on her and most of it was leg. Even if he <em>weren’t</em> a Witcher he’d have no problem catching her in open terrain like that and then she was done. </p>
<p>“Hey,” he said, soft but alarmed. He stepped back another pace, and then hooked one of the chairs at the table out with his foot and dropped into it. “Hey. I’m not-- what’s going on?”</p>
<p>“I,” she said, “nothing, it’s-- I,” and she had to stop to breathe. No, he wasn’t going to kill her. This wasn’t how she was going to die. She already knew how she was going to die. It wasn’t super-detailed, but it wasn’t a sword. He wasn’t going to kill her, and now he thought she was crazy. </p>
<p>“You’ve had a rough couple of days,” he said. “Fuck, I didn’t even think-- yeah, okay, I can see how you’d think I lured you out here to hurt you or something but, ma’am, I don’t think you understand how much Lambert would kill me. He should be back soon-- any minute, at this point. But I figured you can shoot lightning from your hands and were the one woman I couldn’t scare just by being me.”</p>
<p><em>Not woman</em>, Keira thought, but she was in no position to speak. Instead she shuffled to the nearest chair and sat down in it, because she was so tired. She was so tired. She almost wished he <em>were</em> going to kill her. She’d seen how he killed-- fast, efficient, even under the severest provocation he was a thoroughgoing professional about it-- and it was better than what was in store for her. She scrubbed at her face with her hands, and got her breathing under control. </p>
<p>Her headache was truly awful now, almost blinding, but there was no help for that. She gathered herself, and said, “I spoke with Philippa Eilheart again today and she sent me a further batch of notes on eye replacements. The first thing, she said, is that you have to take the stones we’re planning to use to form the core of the new eye, and carry them closely on your person for as long as possible.” She pulled the little pouch out of one of her pockets, and held it out to him. “Philippa made a whole funny thing about how she’d kept them down her bodice and had no idea where a man would best carry them.”</p>
<p>“Well,” Aiden said mildly, reaching out from as far away as possible to take the little bag with his fingertips-- he hardly had to stir from his chair, his arms were so ridiculously long-- “it’s true, I don’t wear one of those.”</p>
<p>“Philippa is a fairly devout lesbian at this point,” Keira said, “so she was likely putting on a bit of the disgust for humorous effect, but I can’t help but echo her bafflement. If you’ve got a good inside shirt pocket, or--”</p>
<p>“Or I could wear it on a string around my neck,” Aiden said, unfolding himself from the chair to go dig through a bag leaning in the corner. In a moment, he came up with a length of cord, threaded it through the drawstrings of the bag, and sat back down in the chair to tie it off. Once he had it attached, though, he picked up the bag and opened it to look in. “These are-- what, now?”</p>
<p>“They’re all agates,” Keira said. “Chosen for being a smooth stone with an amenable sort of resonance, and not of porous composition. They make a good foundation.”</p>
<p>“The thing I have now is too rough,” he said. “It hurts. Lambert has to cast that cantrip at least once a day even if I don’t go outside, and I wash it out twice a day. I’ve tried putting a half a blindfold on to keep it closed but then the pressure hurts my eyelid.”</p>
<p>Keira nodded. “It’s not terribly well-designed,” she said. “We can do better.”</p>
<p>“I mostly can see out of it,” he said. “It’s got some. Quirks.”</p>
<p>“Yes, that’s what my research is suggesting,” she said, carefully neutral-- was he going to give her correct information, here? </p>
<p>“I think-- well, I can see through illusions with it,” he said. She let her eyebrows go up. That was what Philippa’s notes had indicated, and she’d wondered if he’d tip his hand about that-- not letting on would give him a tactical advantage over her, but likely he’d guessed she’d know.</p>
<p>“We can test the degree of that,” she said, “some other time, when I’m not flat exhausted.” She sighed. “Seems to me that would be useful, in your line of work.”</p>
<p>“Can get awkward,” he said. “Feel like I’m seeing things I’m not supposed to.”</p>
<p>She sighed. “The polite thing to do is to ignore it,” she said, knowing he was referring to her cosmetic illusions. She rolled her shoulders, feeling some of her anxiety letting down into glumness as the pain in her head settled in for the duration. “I don’t-- usually wear so much cosmetic shit,” she said, “but-- other mages. Even if they can see right through it, which most of them can if they try, it’s still-- you still are expected to make the effort. So I do.” </p>
<p>She’d dismissed some of her illusions, and hadn’t put some on in the first place-- she was wearing a coat, because she couldn’t spare the energy for an insulating spell today, for one. But she still had stuff on her face, though, and probably her hair. </p>
<p>“Does Lambert know what you really look like?” Aiden said, and from his tone he was trying to make it a joke and realized about halfway through that it didn’t work. “Or,” he said, but there wasn’t really anything else he could say.</p>
<p>There, her chest hurt again. It was getting old. “Actually,” she said, bitter, but bit it off; part of her was almost drowning in the memory of that night, of him blindfolding himself with his robe sash, of how that had felt so painfully good at the time and how it just hurt now. She was angry, now, thinking of how that whole night would sound, as Lambert told the story to Aiden, what sort of comic figure she’d become in the re-telling. “I guess if he wants to tell you about it, he will. I guess there’s a lot of things he could tell you about me. I don’t suppose it’s my business what he tells you about me.” Now her chest felt weird and hot and tight, and so did her face, and she was tired in a different way. </p>
<p>“Hey, no,” Aiden said, chagrined. “He-- he hasn’t told me-- things about you.”</p>
<p>Why would he? Why would anyone talk about anyone else, except as an amusing anecdote of a past. “He-- he never told me much about you,” she said, and she should leave it there, politely, “but a few little things-- and how much--” She had to stop, and blink tears away, that had started out angry but were just sad, now. She made herself take a deep breath and hold it, to get herself under control, and let it out, now just sad and tired. “The things he still had, of yours,” she said, quieter. “And they were enough that I could find you. I didn’t do it to pry. I wanted to-- I wanted to know-- but it wasn’t about that.”</p>
<p>The problem with letting people see you is that then people have seen you, and know what you look like, and there’s not really a way to armor yourself against that because it’s the truth. She couldn’t quite regret having done it, because it had been so undeniably good at the time, but now it was another thing she had to carry, knowing that Lambert knew those things, knowing he’d seen what he had; then, it had felt like sharing a load, but now it was so much heavier because she now also had to carry not knowing what he’d do with his part of it, and whether he’d use it to hurt her. </p>
<p>He wouldn’t mean to, but that didn’t mean anything.</p>
<p>“He did tell me,” Aiden said quietly, “a little bit-- mostly, the reasons I should understand that you’re not like-- other mages.”</p>
<p>Keira had to close her eyes for a moment. Lambert would mean well. He would; she hadn’t wronged him, and he didn’t in his turn tend to wrong anyone who hadn’t wronged him first. But. He had power over her, now, and nobody who’d ever had power over her had failed to use it to hurt her. The things he’d seen about her that she hadn’t even known about herself-- well, now those were things that people knew. “There are a lot of things I’m not,” she said quietly. </p>
<p>“But I think,” Aiden said, “I think-- he told me that he used his words with you and explained himself and that you didn’t-- return the sentiment, but the thing about Lambert--” He fidgeted, earnest. “The thing about all of the Wolf School Witchers-- No, really the thing about Witchers in general.” His expression had gone a little sardonic. “I say this like I’m better at it than he is and I’m-- not, really, only a little. The Wolves had this-- they were the, the old school,  and had to be tougher than anyone, and Lambert was really taught not to-- not to acknowledge certain things?”</p>
<p>Keira thought wearily that Aiden didn’t realize that she already knew about Lambert’s complicated relationship with gender, and this was getting old. “I get it,” she said. </p>
<p>“I mean,” Aiden said. “His idea of--”</p>
<p>“I get it,” she said. “Aiden, maybe I don’t know him like you do, I’ve only been living with him for a couple of months, but I’m not completely unobservant. I get it. He explained it to me.”</p>
<p>“He says he explained it,” Aiden said. “He thinks he explained it. But I don’t think he really did.”</p>
<p>“He did,” she said. Gods, save her from yet another man who bought the pretty tits diversion and took it to mean her head was empty. </p>
<p>“Please,” Aiden said, “please hear me out. I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing, here.”</p>
<p>“We’re talking about Lambert,” Keira said, “and the way he is, and whether I know him at all or not.”</p>
<p>“I’m not saying you don’t know him,” Aiden said. “I’m saying you don’t have the context.”</p>
<p><em>Yes, yes, you had twenty years with him and will have unknowable decades more</em>, Keira thought. <em>And I’ll be a story he tells, sometimes, and strangers will come up to me and grin and say things about me that nobody but him, including me, ever knew.</em></p>
<p>“The way our relationship worked,” Aiden went on, while she was too flattened to say anything, “we could see other people if we wanted, you know? And we--”</p>
<p>“And he never did,” Keira put in, “yes, we did discuss it.”</p>
<p>“Until you,” Aiden said, almost triumphant, gesturing to her as if this were some conclusion he were making. </p>
<p>“Yes,” she said flatly, “because you were dead.”</p>
<p>“<em>No</em>!” Aiden said, intense, half-rising from his chair, which startled her into a flinch. “No, it’s not that! It’s that he--”</p>
<p>She recoiled back as he started toward her, her heart lurching and the pain behind her eyes spiking, and he noticed her reaction and grimaced and dropped back into the chair. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, “I just-- sorry.”</p>
<p>“But you’re <em>not</em> dead,” she said, fighting rising nausea. Ah, fuck, Triss’s tisane had worn off. “And-- fuck-- I need a minute.” She lurched to her feet and to the door and out, just in time, and there was nothing to bring up but her body didn’t care. </p>
<p>He started to come out after her and she shoved the door, hard, with her foot to push him back inside. She didn’t want him to look at her, didn’t want him looming over her and watching her fall apart, because she had a terrible sneaking suspicion that he was actually a nice person, a decent man, and he would understandably pity her, and possibly the very last thing she could handle in her life at the moment was fucking <em>pity</em>. </p>
<p>Yet another man, who thought she was stupid and knew she was unlovable and pitied her for it. </p>
<p>She heaved and retched and slammed the door with her foot and wedged her body into position to hold the fucking door shut because he was going to come out here and try to be nice at her and she didn’t fucking <em>want</em> that.</p>
<p>After an interminable little while-- probably a minute or two-- her body gave up on the dry-heaving as unproductive, and she mostly went limp. He tried the door again and she kicked it back shut.</p>
<p>“Leave me <em>alone</em>,” she said viciously, “to have my <em>fucking migraine</em> in <em>fucking peace</em>, you gods-damned <em>vulture</em>.”</p>
<p>It was a full-blown migraine by this point, and she couldn’t really see, and it was her own fucking fault for not managing to make herself eat something and lie down for a minute, but really it was Aiden’s fucking fault for making her come out here when she should have been resting back when there was still a chance to stave this off. </p>
<p>Gods, <em>men</em>, and their fucking <em>feelings</em>.</p>
<p>He didn’t try the door again, but after another little while-- this was probably considerably more than a minute-- he was crouching next to her, and she vaguely realized he must have gone out a window to get here, because her foot was still planted against the door. </p>
<p>“I can’t let you lie here,” he said. “Lambert’s going to be home any minute and he’s going to see your fucking dead body here and think I killed you, and I did not come back from the fucking dead after being tortured in a basement for three years for my whatever he is to murder me three days later because I did whatever I did to you just now.”</p>
<p>“It’s a migraine,” she said, and it hurt to talk so her speech was slurred. “He’s not going to blame you for a migraine. Leave me alone.”</p>
<p>“Well,” Aiden said, “this isn’t helping,” and took her shoulder gently.</p>
<p>She thought about struggling but knew she would throw up again if she did, so she let him do it, let him turn her until he could pick her up gently, and then take her into the house.</p>
<p>“I’m taking off your coat,” he said, setting her down gently on a soft surface in a dim space-- the bench, in the kitchen-- “and your boots. Lean right there and don’t move and I won’t touch you any more than I have to.”</p>
<p>He very carefully peeled her out of her jacket, and then pulled off her boots, and went away and in a moment came back. “I’m going to hold the back of your head for a moment,” he said, and his hand was warm and very big, bigger even than Lambert’s. “This is water, in this cup. Will you rinse and spit? There’s a basin here, can you do it?”</p>
<p>The water was blessedly warm. She did as he said, and he gently guided her head back into a resting position, and then helped her drink a few mouthfuls of the warm water. </p>
<p>“Now,” he said, “I’m putting you in the bed in the main room, where it’s warm and dark. Do you want a cold compress for your eyes?” She managed a tiny gesture toward a nod. “All right. Now just let go, I’m going to pick you up again.”</p>
<p>He put her down in the box bed, managing to do so in a way that her skirts didn’t tangle her legs, and there was a quilt there so he spread it out over her, and in a moment he came back with the cold compress and then he slid the box door shut and went away.</p>
<p>She lay there for a moment, meaning to just collect herself and get up again, but there was nothing to collect, and then there was just nothing.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>emetophobia: Keira has a migraine and throws up twice, neither time described graphically. </p>
<p>The first time is right after she goes through the second portal, in this paragraph:<br/><i>She was so tired that casting the portal hurt this time, </i></p>
<p>and the second time is spread out over three paragraphs after Aiden says "I just-- sorry" and her paragraph begins “But you’re <em>not</em> dead,” she said, and it's mentioned several times.<br/>She remains queasy through much of the rest of the scene but has no further episodes.</p>
<hr/>
<p><br/><br/>Other updates-- the weird news is that Seanan McGuire reblogged <a href="https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/639871830215262208/whats-a-dnw">my post on what Do Not Wants are</a>, RIP my menchies but of course I'm delighted (though of course I could have phrased some things better, alas, c'est la vie), the bad news is I wrote that post because I wanted to enter my Eskel-focused sequel to this here story (why do you think I've had them wondering where he is? I'm building up to something, best believe!) in a fandom exchange because I love the Witcher fandom so much and the one I was looking at suddenly [like, <i>well</i> after signups started] came out with a bunch of unexpected content restrictions that don't make a ton of sense given the canon (and the fact that my "???" post about it was met so instantly with, like, FURY made me feel like that's not a group I want to get near, no shade if you're their pal [and i mean that! have fun, just leave me out of it] but if you're not their pal they're not very nice to you and I don't find that pleasant in a fandom or uhh at all promising in a logistically-complex event that's nominally open to more than just immediate friends of the mods?), but the good news is someone made another event so I could still enter my story in an event [i mean they didn't do it just for me but i'm pretending they did to feed my massive ego {please understand I am kidding, there are a lot more people than me affected more severely by this kind of stuff}] without having to worry about mods deciding it was "too graphic", so anyway--<br/>if you're in any way so inclined, please go enter the <a href="https://fisstech-and-succubi.tumblr.com/">Fisstech &amp; Succubi event</a> and give us your prompts and your DNWs and maybe you'll get matched with me and make me some art or a story. My Eskel sequel will happen whether I figure out how to write it for that exchange or not so I may well wind up baking a second cake, as it were, and I'm trying to work out the logistics of doing some embroidery-art treats because listen I can't really draw but I can design embroideries and want more practice. So anyway! Sign up so I'm not lonely, it has been a long cold winter full of chaos and mayhem and I just want some nice, possibly-smutty, possibly-canon-typically-violent company. 😅</p>
<p>On a more personally-hopeful note-- these last chapters have all been me posting slowly thru a backlog I generated in a fugue state in mid-November and I was worried because I hadn't really been able to write anything since, y'know, tragic events, but last night I figured out how to write the end of this story, so <i>that's</i> a relief, yay!</p>
<p>Thanks for reading, this has been B's Coping Corner, bring your own snacks. &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>no particular warnings this chapter, i don't think.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <hr/>
<p>“What the fuck,” Aiden muttered to himself, standing outside the door of the house. He rubbed his face, careful this time not to rub too hard on the eyelid of his replacement eye, and scratched his fingers through his hair, and looked out at the turn-out pen where the remaining horse was watching him with mild interest. “What the fuck was that,” he said to the horse, who had no comment. </p>
<p>It had taken him a while to nerve himself up to summon the mage. He’d hit on the plan right away, as soon as Lambert had started making noises about going into town. He needed to talk to that mage without Lambert there, he knew he did, and he also was wondering how well his sanity would stand up to some alone time, and so it had seemed a good idea. But he’d been scared to do it. </p>
<p>He’d pickpocketed the token off Lambert on impulse pretty much right after the mage had given it to him, and had stashed it behind the bench in the main room. Lambert hadn’t missed it, apparently, or hadn’t said anything if he had. Aiden knew it was about three-quarters of an hour’s ride to town, and he’d spent about that long first puttering around the house and freaking himself out as he kept, in the absence of distraction, forgetting not to brace himself against the control spells that weren’t there, and then once he’d decided to go through with it, staring at that token and summoning the courage to break it.</p>
<p>Finally he’d snapped it in a quick impulse before he could second-guess himself for approximately the thousandth time, and he’d actually had to leave the room and go wait in the bedroom, mildly panicking at the thought of the mage portaling into the main room. But she hadn’t come, and hadn’t come, and he’d gone outside to look and she wasn’t there, and finally he’d concluded that she’d just gone and showed up wherever Lambert was, because obviously she’d have some sort of way of tracking him, and the jig was up on that, and so there was no point worrying. It had almost been another three-quarters of an hour; if Lambert had run his errands quickly, he could be well on his way back by now.</p>
<p>Right about then his medallion had buzzed. He wasn’t Lambert, to have researched the specific resonances of each way the medallion alerted, but he rather thought that might be a portal, which meant it was the mage. He panicked, briefly, got himself under control, and then went and stood at the window-- a little back so nobody could see him standing there-- and watched her approach the house.</p>
<p>She’d looked-- tired, beaten-down, sad. Not at all like-- well, that was what she’d looked like the previous time, too. And it had come to him, then, watching her walk up to the house-- watching her notice the sole horse, the lack of anyone to greet her, the smoke from the chimney-- watching her weary walk change to a slower, wary one-- that she was, of course, a powerful mage, but she was also just a person, a tired person doing her best, a small slender person whose embroidered skirt hem had mud on it and who moved like her head was hurting her, and she was a person who very clearly was quite devoted to Lambert and for whatever reason had put herself out on his behalf quite a great deal.</p>
<p>She’d shown no real outward fear when she’d seen him, and probably her practiced blithe face suited her fine for politics, but he was a Witcher: he’d smelled that she was already tired and miserable and sick, and he’d watched her pupils constrict in fear, heard her heart kick up and her breath catch, smelled the fear-sweat breaking out on her skin. She was terrified of him, like any woman cornered alone, or even like an experienced fighter caught out. She hadn’t come prepared; she’d come vulnerable, expecting an ally. It wasn’t hard to figure that out. She wasn’t ready.</p>
<p>But he hadn’t been expecting anything remotely like that at all. He’d been prepared to do his best to provoke her into showing her true colors while Lambert wasn’t there to intervene, and failing that, he’d been prepared to face her down and get her to admit what her real game was here, but he hadn’t at all been ready to <em>console</em> her.</p>
<p>Which was possibly where he’d gone wrong, because he hadn’t tried to work out what she’d misunderstand and be prepared with a new tack. So he’d just blundered in blind, and had made a hash of it somehow. </p>
<p>Despite what Lambert seemed to think, Aiden was not actually generally a great success with women-- he was somehow both awkward and intimidating and not particularly good at being smooth, really; the people he slept with who weren’t Lambert were a haphazard mix of the normal sort of humans who’d fuck a Witcher, which generally included star-struck simple folk  or impressionable youths of assorted genders, the sorts of fearless bored farm wives who really kept the world turning, and the expected admixture of harlots, strumpets, and assorted sex workers who were up for a challenge. </p>
<p>But he’d never actually botched a conversation with one so spectacularly that she’d had to flee the room to vomit, and moreover had kicked the door shut directly into his face. That had been somewhat impressive, and he’d had to stanch his bloody, possibly re-broken nose before he could make another attempt. </p>
<p>In his pique at the bloody nose he’d genuinely considered leaving her lying there, but his heart wasn’t that hard; she’d been making the most horrible little miserable noises as she tried to get her breathing under control, and was so clearly suffering badly he couldn’t bear to. She obviously hadn’t been looking when she’d kicked the door, it wasn’t like she’d deliberately punched him. It was his own fault for not being ready for it, not expecting her to resist.</p>
<p>So once he had the blood stopped, he’d had to go around the other side of the house to climb out the bedroom window, as it was the only one large enough to allow him to pass through easily and not have to land on a pile of dirt. </p>
<p>She’d given up on resisting, by then, and let him pick her up. She weighed almost nothing; not only was she a small person with a slight build, she also was dehydrated and <em>still</em> hadn’t really eaten, he could tell by her scent. He brought her inside, got her cleaned up, wiped some of the mud off her skirt, got her to drink a little water, and put her to bed. When he carefully took her fancy embroidered jacket off, she had a man’s shirt on underneath, with red-and-white Temerian embroidery, and her breasts bound tightly under it-- it gave her a boyish aspect he hadn’t expected. There’d been an illusion tied to the jacket to give her the appearance of breasts, and that seemed an odd thing to do, when he knew she really had them-- why bind them down, and then layer the illusion of not having done so? Maybe for strenuous exercise?</p>
<p>Most of the last of her illusions had dissipated. Now with both eyes he could see she had a few little scars on her face and her eye makeup was smudged and she had dark circles under her eyes. There was still a tracery of illusion over her hair, but it was fading as well. She really wasn’t faking; she was exhausted and badly depleted. </p>
<p>She let him arrange her body in the bed, and he was uncomfortably aware of how small she was, how fragile; her arms were like little sticks, and he suddenly recognized that the shirt was one of Lambert’s, soft and mended, too long for her in the sleeves so she had the cuffs turned back and folded twice. </p>
<p>He slid the cabinet door shut, having checked that it had lattice-work at the top so it would allow in enough air so she wouldn’t suffocate, and left her there. He didn’t expect her to stay long, but he went and built up the fire a little to make the room warmer, and when he came back he could hear that her breathing had evened out and she was asleep.</p>
<p>Well, good, probably.</p>
<p>Which led him to this moment, standing outside and talking to a horse. He was doing this for a reason, of course-- the two horses he and Lambert had stolen from Halmatia’s stables, a mare and a gelding, were friends, possibly siblings or half-siblings, and got along quite well, and the relevant aspect was that this horse would certainly alert him to the return of the other one just as soon as she could smell it. </p>
<p>“I don’t know what the fuck to do about this,” Aiden said to the horse, who flicked her ears and came closer to the fence as he approached, whuffling at him to determine whether he had any treats for her. She had been someone’s spoiled favorite in her previous life, and Aiden wasn’t above spoiling a horse, but he didn’t have anything on him at the moment.</p>
<p>“She could be faking,” he said to the horse. “Well, by the scent, she can’t be <em>faking</em>-faking, but she could have set this up, to come and appear vulnerable so I’d be off my guard.” As he said it, he thought it sounded insane. “Yeah, that doesn’t... Well. It’d be risky; what if I really had tried to kill her? And I don’t think she could fake being that scared. I mean, I don’t know her, she might be-- she might be in my head right now making me see all this.” Again, as he said it, he realized that also sounded completely insane.</p>
<p>The horse snorted, decided he clearly didn’t have any treats, and turned and walked a little ways down the fence to go continue murdering a sapling that had unwarily chosen to grow up in the turnout pen, which hadn’t been used in some time.</p>
<p>“Thanks,” he told her. “You’ve been a help.” He turned and went back into the house, which now smelled of a miserable, sick mage who was frightened and exhausted and in pain. Yeah Lambert would probably be able to smell this from outside. Would he assume it was Aiden’s fault? </p>
<p>And that was really the question, Aiden thought, as he ran an <em>Igni</em> over the kettle to get it hot enough to make some tea, for want of anything better to do. The crucial, central, focal question, here: Would Lambert take her side, or Aiden’s, if he thought there was a disagreement? If Aiden put his foot down and said he wanted nothing to do with this mage (who, to be fair, had put herself out tremendously to help and appeared to have neglected to come up with any ulterior motive beyond a devotion to Lambert she nonsensically appeared to consider unrequited)... </p>
<p>Well, it was a stupid thought exercise, because Aiden would, he was realizing by now, be pretty clearly in the wrong, plus it would be a complete dick move to do that to Lambert, who did seem to be pretty sincerely fond of the mage on his part. There really, really didn’t, despite Aiden’s (justified! a forlorn part of him insisted, but that didn’t really matter now) paranoia, seem to be any magical compulsion in either direction.</p>
<p>He hadn’t really been prepared for that. But, on the other hand, he wasn’t actually that surprised. He’d absolutely known this was what he was going to discover, he just had refused to actually be ready for it in any way, to come up with any kind of realistic plan of what to do.</p>
<p>He set the tea to brew and rubbed at his forehead. So clearly he was going to have to make room in his life for this mage-- really, make room in his <em>Lambert</em> for this mage, which was probably just as well because there was rather too much of Lambert for him to absorb entirely on his own, and if he couldn't really handle being on his own for a while he was going to need an ally just to help file some of the rough edges off Lambert now and then.</p>
<p>The mage in question rolled over in the bed, making a raspy breathing sound. Waking up? Well, good, he could offer her tea and maybe try again to explain things to her. </p>
<p>She gasped, which didn’t sound good. And then she made a really horrible noise, as if she were trying to scream but too badly injured, which was the sort of noise Aiden had heard many times and there was never a time you liked it-- even when it was someone you’d badly injured yourself it was unpleasant. He darted over to the cabinet, and then hesitated. She made the noise again.</p>
<p>“Keira,” he said, “Keira, are you--” She made another noise, and he said “I’m opening the door now,” because another thing that you never liked was when your simple physical presence scared somebody you hadn’t meant to scare.</p>
<p>(Being rather a bit over six feet tall tended to lead to that sort of thing pretty often. But to say Aiden was used to it was to rather overstate the matter; it stung every time.)</p>
<p>He pushed the door open and Keira was half-sat-up, wedged into the corner of the box bed like she was trying to crawl backward through the wall, clutching at her stomach with her eyes wide and staring. He’d seen that look, that was a weird-visions sort of Prophecy kind of look; her eyes shone oddly. She was seeing something that wasn’t there but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real. “Keira,” he said.</p>
<p>“No,” she said weakly, and then he saw the sheen leave her eyes and she fell over and curled up and started to shake so hard he thought she was having a seizure. He crammed himself through the door and took her by the shoulders to get her away from the wall so she wouldn’t crack her head on it, but she wasn’t having a seizure so she grabbed his shirt and clung onto it like a little kid. </p>
<p>“Lambert,” she said, and buried her face in the shirt which come to think of it sure was Lambert’s. “Lambert, I saw it again.” She wasn’t crying but she was still shaking as hard as if she were. </p>
<p>He considered correcting her, decided it wasn’t worth it, and said, “It’s all right,” for want of anything cleverer. </p>
<p>“Of all the fucking prophetic visions,” she said shakily, “why that? I’ve never been into that shit. I don’t need it.”</p>
<p>“What did you see?” he asked, smoothing his hand across her narrow back. She was so little and fragile. </p>
<p>“The same thing,” she said, which wasn’t helpful. “The-- my death.”</p>
<p>“Oh, that’s heavy,” he said. </p>
<p>She sobbed, just once, then got herself back under control. “I keep seeing it,” she said. “Over and ov-- the same way--”</p>
<p>“That sounds fucking terrible,” Aiden said. It really did. Even the most paranoid part of him could not believe she was faking this, if only because he had yet to ever meet a mage who would willingly make herself look quite so bedraggled and pathetic.</p>
<p>“Lambert,” she said, sounding shaky but resolved, “if you’re there when it-- if you see it happen, will you do me a favor and mercy-kill me, because I don’t want to linger like that.”</p>
<p>“That’s a big ask,” Aiden said, somewhat boggled. “Listen, Keira-- I’m not--”</p>
<p>The door of the house opened, and Lambert said, “Ha, Aiden, I found the <em>good</em>--” and then stopped short.</p>
<p>The box bed was adjacent to the doorway, so he’d be able to see Aiden’s legs hanging out of it but not into it. Probably, the scent had stopped him. He took another step in, slamming the door behind himself, and Keira shoved herself up and away from Aiden, staring at him in unmistakable horror.</p>
<p>“Uh,” Aiden said, “it was too awkward to correct you.”</p>
<p>Lambert was standing at the entrance to the box bed, blinking in at them with a comical expression of confusion. “Keira,” he said. </p>
<p>Keira sat, wavering a moment, and then covered her face with her hands and said “Fuck,” and started to cry. </p>
<p>Aiden figured that was his cue to get out of there, so he scrambled back out of the bed and said, “Listen, you need to do your thing on her that fixes headaches, she’s fucked-up pretty bad.”</p>
<p>Lambert’s expression cleared somewhat, and he shed his swords and armored gambeson and climbed in, leaving his feet sticking out. “Keira,” he said, “hold still,” and cast his weird Sign on her face.</p>
<p>She gasped, writhing in his grasp, and then collapsed against his chest, her breathing coming fast and shaky for a moment. Aiden realized he was standing there staring at them like a lummox; it was an oddly intimate, almost sexual thing to see, and he felt like a voyeur. Which, uhh, was a thought, but clearly not an appropriate one for the moment. He crossed his arms self-consciously over his chest and backed up a pace so he wasn’t looming. </p>
<p>“You came back,” Lambert said, holding her tightly. “Keira, I was so worried about you. You came back.”</p>
<p>Aiden cleared his throat, but then shuffled his feet and didn’t say anything. “I didn’t come on purpose,” she grumbled, but didn’t pull away, letting Lambert cradle her to himself.</p>
<p>Aiden picked up Lambert’s swords and gambeson and busied himself putting them away. “You haven’t been eating,” Lambert said. It wasn’t like moving four feet away was really going to put Aiden out of earshot, but at least he wasn’t standing there staring at them like a slapped trout. </p>
<p>“I’m trying,” Keira said. “I can’t-- and I just had that stupid vision again.”</p>
<p>“With the impalement?” Lambert said. “Ah, fuck. Do you know what set it off?”</p>
<p>“It’s a true dream,” Keira said, “those do what they want. Fucking-- Destiny, I guess, wants to remind me--” She broke off. There was a rustling. Aiden hung the swords neatly on the wall, taking far longer than necessary to make sure they were arranged just so. Lambert’s fucking enormous overcompensation swords. Aiden could use them, they were just clunky and slow. He missed his steel sword. He had no idea how he was ever going to afford a replacement.</p>
<p>“Sweetheart,” Lambert said, and kissed her, probably on the top of the head.</p>
<p>“Don’t call me that,” she said, low and tired. Aiden grimaced. Fuck, did she <em>not</em> know Lambert? That wasn’t the kind of endearment he would have used lightly, unless he was being sarcastic, which he very clearly was not. It wasn’t that Lambert <em>couldn’t</em> sarcastically kiss someone on top of the head; there was nothing Lambert couldn’t do sarcastically-- but in this moment, he <em>wasn’t</em>, which was crucial.</p>
<p>“Kiera,” Lambert said, hurt. <em>Ah, fuck.</em> Aiden shook out the gambeson and hung it up and then spotted the bags of supplies Lambert had put down inside the door, which looked good for quite a bit of self-occupying time, so he scooped them up and took them over to the table. </p>
<p>“I don’t need this from you,” she said, and crawled out of the bed and sat on the trunk that made the step to get into the box. She looked fucking adorable, Aiden was slightly startled to notice-- sleep-rumpled and cranky and disarranged but not sick anymore, the weight of her headache palpably lifted. “You don’t owe me anything.”</p>
<p>Lambert wriggled his way back out of the bed and thumped down onto the trunk next to her, made slightly awkward by his attempts not to get his muddy boots anywhere near the bedding. “Keira,” he said. </p>
<p>“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Aiden said, seeing immediately that this wasn’t going anywhere, but then he remembered that he’d fucked this up badly enough that she’d busted his nose, so he went back to pretending to be busy rooting through the bags of things Lambert had purchased, paying absolutely no attention to any of their contents.</p>
<p>“I am a grown,” Keira said, and hesitated strangely. “Person, and I do not need--”</p>
<p>“It’s not about needing or owing,” Lambert said. “It’s about--” but he clearly hadn’t prepared for this either, because he didn’t know what to say.</p>
<p>“I am <em>sick</em>,” Keira said, tears starting, “and <em>tired</em>, of <em>men</em>,” and Lambert flinched and she didn’t seem to notice, “thinking they know what I want or what I need and thinking they can <em>pity</em> me, I am--” and then, perhaps, she realized what she’d said, and grimaced, angrily dashing tears away. “I don’t-- I don’t want <em>anybody’s</em> fucking pity, Lambert, man or woman or Witcher or mage or princess--”</p>
<p>“Hey, hold up,” Aiden said, alarmed, and stepped back into range of the conversation, maybe a little too fast.</p>
<p>Keira flinched violently, and it was crystal fucking clear where she’d gotten those reflexes if it hadn’t already been, and Aiden flinched back too, horrified to have set her off like that, <em>again</em>. Lambert’s expression went through a bunch of very small adjustments, only some of which Aiden could read, but he knew enough to be sure Lambert, firstly, recognized those reflexes, and secondly, had never caused her to react like that himself, which must be nice, and thirdly possibly now thought Aiden had done something to have primed her to react like that, which was fucking typical of Aiden’s luck, and fourthly was possibly set off by it himself, now, which was about the last thing any of them needed. </p>
<p>Having a nearly eighty-inch armspan was incredibly useful in combat and in getting stuff off shelves and the rest of the time it was a <em>real fucking drag</em>. </p>
<p>“I’m not trying to loom,” Aiden said forlornly from across the room, “this is just me, I’m sorry, I’m out of practice.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know where you’re getting this notion of pity from,” Lambert said. He at least didn’t seem to have actually gotten set off, so that was a small mercy. “I genuinely just--”</p>
<p>“I would be well able to take care of myself,” Keira said, “if I weren’t so busy running around at your beck and call. I wouldn’t have had a migraine in the first place if I’d just had a chance to rest.”</p>
<p>“Well, hey, that’s not Lambert’s fault,” Aiden said, but he was standing so far back she wasn’t paying attention to him, which was just fucking great because if he came any closer he’d scare her. He really couldn’t win. He contemplated lying on the ground and grabbing people’s ankles. He could reach, from here. </p>
<p>“I’m not saying you can’t take care of yourself,” Lambert said, “I’m just saying you <em>aren’t</em>, and I want to help you--”</p>
<p>“I don’t need anything,” Keira said.</p>
<p>“Haven’t I been?” Lambert asked. “Haven’t we been doing that, all this time? What the hell have we been doing?”</p>
<p>“We’ve been passing a long cold winter,” Keira said, “and now it’s spring and I’ve gotten you your life back, and you’re welcome, and I mean that, but now I need you to leave me alone.”</p>
<p>Lambert looked stricken, like Aiden had never seen him before. “Keira,” Lambert said faintly.</p>
<p>She pushed to her feet, and went to the door. </p>
<p>“No,” Aiden said. “Fuck. Wait. Your boots. Wait.” He didn’t dare go grab her arm, and Lambert wasn’t going to, but he did point at where her boots were lying, near the bench along the other wall of the room.</p>
<p>She looked back at him, coolly, unimpressed, where he didn’t dare come closer. She raised one eyebrow and flicked her fingers, and he saw the shimmer of a spell settle over her bare feet. </p>
<p>“Don’t,” he said, pleading. “Wait. Keira, don’t.”</p>
<p>She pushed the door open and stepped out through it, and pulled it shut behind herself.</p>
<p>Aiden picked up her boots and grabbed her jacket and went to the door, but his medallion buzzed and he heard the portal whoosh open, then closed. </p>
<p>“Well, fuck,” he said. “I fucked that up, Lambert. That was me.”</p>
<p>Lambert had gone completely blank, sitting on the bench like he’d never moved in his life. “I don’t,” Lambert said blankly, blinking. Then he blinked again, shook his head slightly, and his expression settled into a more familiar, bitter look. “Well,” he said, “I <em>told</em> you, she doesn’t return the sentiment.”</p>
<p>“No,” Aiden said quietly, “she does, that’s why she’s upset. I tried to explain it and she got angry at me because she couldn’t understand what I was saying, and that’s my fault, Lambert.”</p>
<p>Lambert looked bleak. He got up, and went over to the table, starting to lay out the things he’d picked up in town. “Well,” he said. He didn’t have anything to follow that up with.</p>
<p>Aiden neatly laid Keira’s boots by the door and hung her jacket on the peg next to Lambert’s gambeson. “Well,” Aiden said quietly.</p>
<p>“Well,” Lambert said again, “at least-- if we give her a couple of days to cool off, at least we have that token she left. Maybe she’ll come back if we use that.”</p>
<p>Aiden closed his eyes for a moment, and then reached over and tapped where the two pieces of the token were lying on the table. “No,” he said heavily, “I did that already, that’s why she was here.”</p>
<p>Lambert went still, looking at it, then slowly turned his eyes up to Aiden’s face. “Why?” he asked. </p>
<p>“I wanted to-- well, it sounds dumb now,” Aiden said, “but I wanted to talk to her alone to see if I couldn’t figure out whether she was really how she said she was. And now I’m sure she really is how she says she is, so that worked, but.” </p>
<p>Lambert frowned. “Why is there blood on your shirt?” he said. </p>
<p>Aiden sighed heavily. “It’s a long story.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i'm a chapter behind on comment responses lol but listen i love every one. <br/>I was going to post this on Friday and then lost track of days uhhhhh all week. what a time to be alive. <br/>Shouts-out to <a href="https://2nico.tumblr.com/post/640166592420970496/lambert-aiden-motivation">Tnico's Lambert and Aiden comics</a> in general for the motivational speeches. I can't fully commit to quite that level of height difference physically but emotionally I'm all over it. (My six-foot-three dude puts his chin on my five-foot-seven head exactly like that first panel and I both love and hate it.)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>a placeholder pointing to the new split-off work!</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Hey this is a temporary placeholder to let you know that I decided to split the story and make the next chapter be the first of a new work. Not just becuase this title kept earworming me with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVNGh5y4q7I">Dusty Boxcar Wall</a>. <br/>Anyway go read the new story , which, fuck i need a title for UHHHHHHHHH</p><p>
  <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28876890">An Involved Process</a>
</p><p> </p><p>god damn I was going to joke about the title being a problem for future me but it just took me like two hours to actually come up with that, so. let's not dwell on what my brain's processing power is up to instead, shall we?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>And seriously, thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, it's been a major coping mechanism for me to be able to distract myself from the fact that this world no longer has a really important person in it. Apologies if my replies are a bit punchy at times. I sort of feel like my brain is an elderly computer that's possibly running malware I don't know about, because it's processing super hard all the time and outputting basically nothing but boy is it busy doing that nothing. But listen I got dressed like a real person today, that's a win. </p>
<p>ah fuck chapter titles. no, this fic has no chapter titles, that's just Too Much Brain for me now.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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